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COPYRIGHT DEPOSrT. 



FANTASIA *'w"-/- 

of the 

UNCONSCIOUS 



BY 

D. H. LAWRENCE 



V 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS SELTZER 

1922 



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Copyright, 1922, by 
Thomas Seltzer, Inc. 



All Rights Reserved 



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Printep jn the United States of America 



NOV 18 '22 

©C1A680980 






CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAG* 

Foreword vii 

I. Introduction i 

II. The Holy Family 14 

III. Plexuses, Planes and So On 29 

IV. Trees and Babies and Papas and Mamas 42 
V. The Five Senses 64 

VI. First Glimmerings of Mind 85 

VII. First Steps in Education . . . . 101 

VIII. Education and Sex in Man, Woman and 

Child 119 

IX. The Birth of Sex 140 

X. Parent Love 164 

XI. The Vicious Circle 185 

XII. Litany of Exhortations . . . . . . 209 

XIII. COSMOLOGICAL 214 

XIV. Sleep and Dreams 234 

XV. The Lower Self 263 

Epilogue 291 



FOREWORD 

The present book is a continuation from 
"Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." The 
generality of readers had better just leave it 
alone. The generality of critics likewise. I 
really don't want to convince anybody. It is 
quite in opposition to my whole nature. I don't 
intend my books for the generality of readers. 
I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy, 
that every man who can read print is allowed to 
believe that he can read all that is printed. I 
count it a misfortune that serious books are ex- 
posed in the public market, like slaves exposed 
naked for sale. But there we are, since we live 
in an age of mistaken democracy, we must go 
through with it. 

I warn the generality of readers, that this 
present book will seem to them only a rather 
more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the 
last. I would warn the generality of critics to 
throw it in the waste paper basket without more 
ado. 

As for the limited few, in whom one must per- 

vii 



viii FOREWORD 

force find an answerer, I may as well say straight 
off that I stick to the solar plexus. That state- 
ment alone, I hope, will thin their numbers 
considerably. 

Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in 
order to apologize for the sudden lurch into 
cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish 
to say that the whole thing hangs inevitably to- 
gether. I am not a scientist. I am an amateur 
of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you 
either believe or you don't. 

I am not a proper archaeologist nor an anthro- 
pologist nor an ethnologist. I am no "scholar'' 
of any sort. But I am very grateful to scholars 
for their sound work. I have found hints, sug- 
gestions for what I say here in all kinds of 
scholarly books, from the Yoga and Plato and 
St. John the Evangel and the early Greek phi- 
losophers like Herakleitos down to Fraser and 
his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and Fro- 
benius. Even then I only remember hints — 
and I proceed by intuition. This leaves you 
quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass of 
revolting nonsense, without a qualm. 

Only let me say, that to my mind there is a 
great field of science which is as yet quite closed 
to us. I refer to the science which proceeds in 



FOREWORD ix 

terms of life and is established on data of living 
experience and of sure intuition. Call it sub- 
jective science if you like. Our objective science 
of modern knowledge concerns itself only with 
phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded 
in their cause-and-effect relationship. I have 
nothing to say against our science. It is perfect 
as far as it goes. But to regard it as exhausting 
the whole scope of human possibility in knowl- 
edge seems to me just puerile. Our science is 
a science of the dead world. Even biology never 
considers life, but only mechanistic functioning 
and apparatus of life. 

I honestly think that the great pagan world 
of which Egypt and Greece were' the last living 
terms, the great pagan world which preceded 
our own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect 
science of its own, a science in terms of life. In 
our era this science crumbled into magic and 
charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles. 

I believe that this great science previous to 
ours and quite different in constitution and 
nature from our science once was universal, 
established all over the then-existing globe. I 
believe it was esoteric, invested in a large priest- 
hood. Just as mathematics and mechanics and 
physics are defined and expounded in the same 



x FOREWORD 

way in the universities of China or Bolivia or 
London or Moscow to-day, so, it seems to me, in 
the great world previous to ours a great science 
and cosmology were taught esoterically in all 
countries of the globe, Asia, Polynesia, America, 
Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion of the 
geographical nature of this previous world 
seems to me most interesting. In the period 
which geologists call the Glacial Period, the 
waters of the earth must have been gathered up 
in a vast body on the higher places of our globe, 
vast worlds of ice. And the sea-beds of to-day 
must have been comparatively dry. So that the 
Azores rose up mountainous from the plain of 
Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes, and 
the Easter Isles and the Marquesas and the rest 
rose lofty from the marvelous great continent of 
the Pacific. 

In that world men lived and taught and knew, 
and were in one complete correspondence over 
all the earth. Men wandered back and forth 
from Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as 
men now sail from Europe to America. The 
interchange was complete, and knowledge, sci- 
ence was universal over the earth, cosmopolitan 
as it is to-day. 

Then came the melting of the glaciers, and 



FOREWORD xi 

the world flood. The refugees from the drowned 
continents fled to the high places of America, 
Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some 
degenerated naturally into cave men, neolithic 
and paleolithic creatures, and some retained 
their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfec- 
tion, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wan- 
dered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids 
or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or 
Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old 
wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic 
forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: 
remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story. 
And so, the intense potency of symbols is part 
at least memory. And so it is that all the great 
symbols and myths which dominate the world 
when our history first begins, are very much the 
same in every country and every people, the 
great myths all relate to one another. And so 
it is that these myths now begin to hypnotize us 
again, our own impulse towards our own sci- 
entific way of understanding being almost spent. 
And so, besides myths, we find the same mathe- 
matic figures, cosmic graphs which remain 
among the aboriginal peoples in all continents, 
mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or 
scientific significance is lost, yet which continue 



xii FOREWORD 

in use for purposes of conjuring or divining. 

If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, 
all right for him. Only I have no more regard 
for his little crowings on his own little dung- 
hill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of 
the one-and-onlies. I like the wide world of 
centuries and vast ages — mammoth worlds be- 
yond our day, and mankind so wonderful in his 
distances, his history that has no beginning yet 
always the pomp and the magnificence of human 
splendor unfolding through the earth's chang- 
ing periods. Floods and fire and convulsions 
and ice-arrest intervene between the great glam- 
orous civilizations of mankind. But nothing 
will ever quench humanity and the human poten- 
tiality to evolve something magnificent out of a 
renewed chaos. 

I do not believe in evolution, but in the 
strangeness and rainbow-change of ever-renewed 
creative civilizations. 

So much, then, for my claim to remarkable dis- 
coveries. I believe I am only trying to stammer 
out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge. 
But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or 
dead sages. It is not for me to arrange fossils, 
and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I couldn't 
do it if I wanted to. But then I can do some- 



FOREWORD xiii 

thing else. The soul must take the hint from 
the relics our scientists have so marvelously 
gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the 
hint develop a new living utterance. The spark 
is from dead wisdom, but the fire is life. 

And as an example — a very simple one — of 
how a scientist of the most innocent modern sort 
may hint at truths which, when stated, he would 
laugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a 
word from the already old-fashioned "Golden 
Bough." "It must have appeared to the ancient 
Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited 
from the fire which resided in the sacred oak." 

Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree 
of Life. That is, life itself. So we must read : 
"It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan 
that the sun was periodically recruited from 
life." — Which is what the early Greek phi- 
losophers were always saying. And which still 
seems to me the real truth, the clue to the cos- 
mos. Instead of life being drawn from the sun, 
it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from 
all the living plants and creatures which nour- 
ish the sun. 

Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans 
were just doddering — the old duffers: or bab- 
bling, the babes. But as for me, I have some 



xiv FOREWORD 

respect for my ancestors, and believe they had 
more up their sleeve than just the marvel of the 
unborn me. 

One last weary little word. This pseudo- 
philosophy of mine — "pollyanalytics," as one of 
my respected critics might say — is deduced from 
the novels and poems, not the reverse. The 
novels and poems come unwatched out of one's 
pen. And then the absolute need which one has 
for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude 
towards oneself and things in general makes one 
try to abstract some definite conclusions from 
one's experiences as a writer and as a man. The 
novels and poems are pure passionate experience. 
These "pollyanalytics" are inferences made 
afterwards, from the experience. 

And finally, it seems to me that even art is 
utterly dependent on philosophy: or if you pre- 
fer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic or phi- 
losophy may not be anywhere very accurately 
stated and may be quite unconscious, in the 
artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men at 
the time, and is by all men more or less compre- 
hended, and lived. Men live and see according 
to some gradually developing and gradually 
withering vision. This vision exists also as a 
dynamic idea or metaphysic — exists first as 



FOREWORD xv 

such. Then it is unfolded into life and art. Our 
vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing 
woefully thin, and the art is wearing absolutely 
threadbare. We have no future; neither for our 
hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone 
gray and opaque. 

We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, 
and find what the heart really believes in, after 
all : and what the heart really wants, for the next 
future. And we've got to put it down in terms 
of belief and of knowledge. And then go for- 
ward again, to the fulfillment in life and art. 

Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk 
through the rent. And if I try to do this — well, 
why not? If I try to write down what I see — 
why not? If a publisher likes to print the book 
— all right. And if anybody wants to read it, let 
him. But why anybody should read one single 
word if he doesn't want to, I don't see. Unless 
of course he is a critic who needs to scribble a 
dollar's worth of words, no matter how. 

Taormina 

October 8, 1921 



FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 
CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

LET us start by making a little apology to 
Psychoanalysis. It wasn't fair to jeer at 
the psychoanalytic unconscious; or perhaps it 
was fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic uncon- 
scious, which is truly a negative quantity and an 
unpleasant menagerie. What was really not 
fair was to jeer at Psychoanalysis as if Freud 
had invented and described nothing but an un- 
conscious, in all his theory. 

The unconscious is not, of course, the clue to 
the Freudian theory. The real clue is sex. A 
sexual motive is to be attributed to all human 
activity. 

Now this is going too far. We are bound to 
admit than an element of sex enters into all 
human activity. But so does an element of 
greed, and of many other things. We are bound 
to admit that into all human relationships, par- 
ticularly adult human relationships, a large ele- 



2 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

ment of sex enters. We are thankful that Freud 
has insisted on this. We are thankful that Freud 
pulled us somewhat to earth, out of all our clouds 
of superfineness. What Freud says is always 
partly true. And half a loaf is better than no 
bread. 

But really, there is the other half of the loaf. 
All is not sex. And a sexual motive is not to be 
attributed to all human activities. We know it, 
without need to argue. 

Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means 
the being divided into male and female; and the 
magnetic desire or impulse which puts male 
apart from female, in a negative or sundering 
magnetism, but which also draws male and 
female together in a long and infinitely varied 
approach towards the critical act of coition. 
Sex without the consummating act of coition is 
never quite sex, in human relationships: just as 
a eunuch is never quite a man. That is to say, 
the act of coition is the essential clue to sex. 

Now does all life work up to the one consum- 
mating act of coition? In one direction, it does, 
and it would be better if psychoanalysis plainly 
said so. In one direction, all life works up to 
the one supreme moment of coition. Let us all 
admit it, sincerely. 



INTRODUCTION 3 

But we are not confined to one direction only, 
or to one exclusive consummation. Was the 
building of the cathedrals a working up towards 
the act of coition? Was the dynamic impulse 
sexual? No. The sexual element was present, 
and important. But not predominant. The 
same in the building of the Panama Canal. The 
sexual impulse, in its widest form, was a very 
great impulse towards the building of the 
Panama Canal. But there was something else, 
of even higher importance, and greater dynamic 
power. 

And what is this other, greater impulse? It is 
the desire of the human male to build a world: 
not "to build a world for you, dear" ; but to build 
up out of his own self and his own belief and his 
own effort something wonderful. Not merely 
something useful. Something wonderful. Even 
the Panama Canal would never have been built 
simply to let ships through. It is the pure dis- 
interested craving of the human male to make 
something wonderful, out of his own head and 
his own self, and his own soul's faith and delight, 
which starts everything going. This is the 
prime motivity. And the motivity of sex is sub- 
sidiary to this : often directly antagonistic. 

That is, the essentially religious or creative 



4 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

motive is the first motive for all human activity. 
The sexual motive comes second. And there is 
a great conflict between the interests of the two, 
at all times. 

What we want to do, is to trace the creative 
or religious motive to its source in the human 
being, keeping in mind always the near rela- 
tionship between the religious motive and the 
sexual. The two great impulses are like man 
and wife, or father and son. It is no use putting 
one under the feet of the other. 

The great desire to-day is to deny the religious 
impulse altogether, or else to assert its absolute 
alienity from the sexual impulse. The orthodox 
religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon 
we thank Freud for giving them tit for tat. But 
the orthodox scientific world says fie! to the re- 
ligious impulse. The scientist wants to discover 
a cause for everything. And there is no cause 
for the religious impulse. Freud is with the sci- 
entists. Jung dodges from his university gown 
into a priest's surplice till we don't know where 
we are. We prefer Freud's Sex to Jung's Libido 
or Bergson's Elan Vital. Sex has at least some 
definite reference, though when Freud makes sex 
accountable for everything he as good as makes 
it accountable for nothing. 



INTRODUCTION 5 

We refuse any Cause, whether it be Sex or 
Libido or Elan Vital or ether or unit of force 
or perpetuum mobile or anything else. But also 
we feel that we cannot, like Moses, perish on the 
top of our present ideal Pisgah, or take the next 
step into thin air. There we are, at the top of 
our Pisgah of ideals, crying Excelsior and try- 
ing to clamber up into the clouds : that is, if we 
are idealists with the religious impulse rampant 
in our breasts. If we are scientists we practice 
aeroplane flying or eugenics or disarmament or 
something equally absurd. 

The promised land, if it be anywhere, lies 
away beneath our feet. No more prancing up- 
wards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiors 
crying world-brotherhood and international love 
and Leagues of Nations. Idealism and material- 
ism amount to the same thing on top of Pisgah, 
and the space is very crowded. We're all cor- 
nered on our mountain top, climbing up one an- 
other and standing on one another's faces in our 
scream of Excelsior. 

To your tents, O Israel! Brethren, let us go 
down. We will descend. The way to our pre- 
cious Canaan lies obviously downhill. An end 
of uplift. Downhill to the land of milk and 
honey. The blood will soon be flowing faster 



6 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

than either, but we can't help that. We can't 
help it if Canaan has blood in its veins, instead 
of pure milk and honey. 

If it is a question of origins, the origin is 
always the same, whatever we say about it. So 
is the cause. Let that be a comfort to us. If we 
want to talk about God, well, we can please our- 
selves. God has been talked about quite a lot, 
and He doesn't seem to mind. Why we should 
take it so personally is a problem. Likewise if 
we wish to have a tea party with the atom, let 
us : or with the wriggling little unit of energy, or 
the ether, or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or any 
other Cause. Only don't let us have sex for tea. 
We've all got too much of it under the table ; and 
really, for my part, I prefer to keep mine there, 
no matter what the Freudians say about me. 

But it is tiring to go to any more tea parties 
with the Origin, or the Cause, or even the Lord. 
Let us pronounce the mystic Om, from the pit 
of the stomach, and proceed. 

There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the 
First Cause is just unknowable to us, and we'd 
be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or the 
Atom. All I say is Om! 

The first business of every faith is to declare 
its ignorance. I don't know where I come from 



INTRODUCTION 7 

— nor where I exit to. I don't know the origins 
of life nor the goal of death. I don't know how 
the two parent cells which are my biological 
origin became the me which I am. I don't in 
the least know what those two parent cells were. 
The chemical analysis is just a farce, and my 
father and mother were just vehicles. And yet, 
I must say, since I've got to know about the 
two cells, I'm glad I do know. 

The Moses of Science and the Aaron of 
Idealism have got the whole bunch of us here on 
top of Pisgah. It's a tight squeeze, and we'll be 
falling very, very foul of one another in five 
minutes, unless some of us climb down. But 
before leaving our eminence let us have a look 
round, and get our bearings. 

They say that way lies the New Jerusalem of 
universal love : and over there the happy valley 
of indulgent Pragmatism : and there, quite near, 
is the chirpy land of the Vitalists : and in those 
dark groves the home of successful Analysis, sur- 
named Psycho: and over those blue hills the 
Supermen are prancing about, though you can't 
see them. And there is Besantheim, and there is 
Eddyhowe, and there, on that queer little table- 
land, is Wilsonia, and just round the corner is 
Rabindranathopolis. . . . 



8 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

But Lord, I can't see anything. Help rne, 
heaven, to a telescope, for I see blank nothing. 

I'm not going to try any more. I'm going to 
sit down on my posterior and sluther full speed 
down this Pisgah, even if it cost me my trouser 
seat. So ho ! — away we go. 

In the beginning — there never was any begin- 
ning, but let it pass. We've got to make a start 
somehow. In the very beginning of all things, 
time and space and cosmos and being, in the be- 
ginning of all these was a little living creature. 
But I don't know even if it was little. In the 
beginning was a living creature, its plasm 
quivering and its life-pulse throbbing. This 
little creature died, as little creatures always do. 
But not before it had had young ones. When the 
daddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that 
was the beginning of the cosmos. Its little body 
fell down to a speck of dust, which the young 
ones clung to because they must cling to some- 
thing. Its little breath flew asunder, the hotness 
and brightness of the little beast — I beg your 
pardon, I mean the radiant energy from the 
corpse flew away to the right hand, and seemed 
to shine warm in the air, while the clammy en- 
ergy from the body flew away to the left hand, 
and seemed dark and cold. And so, the first little 



INTRODUCTION g 

master was dead and done for, and instead of his 
little living body there was a speck of dust in the 
middle, which became the earth, and on the right 
hand was a brightness which became the sun, 
rampaging with all the energy that had come 
out of the dead little master, and on the left hand 
a darkness which felt like an unrisen moon. 
And that was how the Lord created the world. 
Except that I know nothing about the Lord, so 
I shouldn't mention it. 

But I forgot the soul of the little master. It 
probably did a bit of flying as well — and then 
came back to the young ones. It seems most 
natural that way. 

Which is my account of the Creation. And 
I mean by it, that Life is not and never was any- 
thing but living creatures. That's what life is 
and will be, just living creatures, no matter how 
large you make the capital L. Out of living 
creatures the material cosmos was made : out of 
the death of living creatures, when their little 
living bodies fell dead and fell asunder into all 
sorts of matter and forces and energies, sun, 
moons, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. 
Where you got the living creature from, that 
first one, don't ask me. He was just there. But 



io FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

he was a little person with a soul of his own. He 
wasn't Life with a capital L. 

If you don't believe me, then don't. I'll even 
give you a little song to sing. 

"If it be not true to me 

What care I how true it be . . " 

That's the kind of man I really like, chirping his 
insouciance. And I chirp back: 

"Though it be not true to thee 

It's gay and gospel truth to me. . ." 

The living live, and then die. They pass 
away, as we know, to dust and to oxygen and 
nitrogen and so on. But what we don't know, 
and what we might perhaps know a little more, 
is how they pass away direct into life itself — that 
is, direct into the living. That is, how many 
dead souls fly over our untidiness like swallows 
and build under the eaves of the living. How 
many dead souls, like swallows, twitter and breed 
thoughts and instincts under the thatch of my 
hair and the eaves of my forehead, I don't know. 
But I believe a good many. And I hope they 
have a good time. And I hope not too many 
are bats. 

I am sorry to say I believe in the souls of the 



INTRODUCTION n 

dead. I am almost ashamed to say, that I believe 
the souls of the dead in some way reenter and 
pervade the souls of the living: so that life is 
always the life of living creatures, and death is 
always our affair. This bit, I admit, is bordering 
on mysticism. I'm sorry, because I don't like 
mysticism. It has no trousers and no trousers 
seat: n'a pas de quoi. And I should feel so un- 
comfortable if I put my hand behind me and 
felt an absolute blank. 

Meanwhile a long, thin, brown caterpillar 
keeps on pretending to be a dead thin beech-twig, 
on a little bough at my feet. He had got his hind 
feet and his fore feet on the twig, and his body 
looped up like an arch in the air between, when 
a fly walked up the twig and began to mount the 
arch of the imitator, not having the least idea 
that it was on a gentleman's coat-tails. The 
caterpillar shook his stern, and the fly made off 
as if it had seen a ghost. The dead twig and the 
live twig now remain equally motionless, enjoy- 
ing their different ways. And when, with this 
very pencil, I push the head of the caterpillar off 
from the twig, he remains on his tail, arched 
forward in air, and oscillating unhappily, like 
some tiny pendulum ticking. Ticking, ticking 
in mid-air, arched away from his planted tail. 



12 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

Till at last, after a long minute and a half, he 
touches the twig again, and subsides into twiggi- 
ness. The only thing is, the dead beech-twig 
can't pretend to be a wagging caterpillar. Yet 
how the two commune! However — we have 
our exits and our entrances, and one man in his 
time plays many parts. More than he dreams 
of, poor darling. And I am entirely at a loss for 
a moral! 

Well, then, we are born. I suppose that's a 
safe statement. And we become at once con- 
scious, if we weren't so before. Nem con. And 
our little baby body is a little functioning organ- 
ism, a little developing machine or instrument 
or organ, and our little baby mind begins to stir 
with all our wonderful psychical beginnings. 
And so we are in bud. 

But it won't do. It is too much of a Pisgah 
sight. We overlook too much. Descendez, cher 
Mo'ise. Vous voyez trop loin. You see too far 
all at once, dear Moses. Too much of a bird's- 
eye view across the Promised Land to the shore. 
Come down, and walk across, old fellow. And 
you won't see all that milk and honey and grapes 
the size of duck's eggs. All the dear little bud- 
ding infant with its tender virginal mind and 
various clouds of glory instead of a napkin. Not 



INTRODUCTION 13 

at all, my dear chap. No such luck of a prom- 
ised land. 

Climb down, Pisgah, and go to Jericho. 
Allons, there is no road yet, but we are all 
Aarons with rods of our own. 



CHAPTER II 

THE HOLY FAMILY 

WE are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein 
for knocking that eternal axis out of the 
universe. The universe isn't a spinning wheel. 
It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. 
Thank goodness for that, for we were getting 
drunk on the spinning wheel. 

So that now the universe has escaped from the 
pin which was pushed through it, like an im- 
paled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multiple 
universe flies its own complicated course quite 
free, and hasn't got any hub, we can hope also to 
escape. 

We won't be pinned down, either. We have 
no one law that governs us. For me there is 
only one law: I am I. And that isn't a law, it's 
just a remark. One is one, but one is not all 
alone. There are other stars buzzing in the 
center of their own isolation. And there is no 
straight path between them. There is no 
straight path between you and me, dear reader, 



THE HOLY FAMILY 15 

so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into 
your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of 
like music into your ears. I am I, but also you 
are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of 
human relativity. We need it much more than 
the universe does. The stars know how to prowl 
round one another without much damage done. 
But you and I, dear reader, in the first convic- 
tion that you are me and that I am you, owing 
to the oneness of mankind, why, we are always 
falling foul of one another, and chewing each 
other's fur. 

You are not me, dear reader, so make no pre- 
tentions to it. Don't get alarmed if / say things. 
It isn't your sacred mouth which is opening and 
shutting. As for the profanation of your sacred 
ears, just apply a little theory of relativity, and 
realize that what I say is not what you hear, but 
something uttered in the midst of my isolation, 
and arriving strangely changed and travel-worn 
down the long curve of your own individual cir- 
cumambient atmosphere. I may say Boh, but 
heaven alone knows what the goose hears. And 
you may be sure that a red rag is, to a bull, some- 
thing far more mysterious and complicated than 
a socialist's necktie. 

So I hope now I have put you in your place, 



16 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

dear reader. Sit you like Watts' Hope on your 
own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, and 
we won't bump into one another if we can help 
it. You can twang your old hopeful lyre. It 
may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It 
is a terrible wowing in my ears. But that may 
be something in my individual atmosphere; some 
strange deflection as your music crosses the space 
between us. Certainly I never hear the concert 
of World Regeneration and Hope Revived 
Again without getting a sort of lock-jaw, my 
teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging har- 
mony. Still, the world-regenerators may really 
be quite excellent performers on their own jews'- 
harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth. 

Now I am going to launch words into space, 
so mind your cosmic eye. 

As I said in my small but naturally immortal 
book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," 
there's more in it than meets the eye. There's 
more in you, dear reader, than meets the eye. 
What, don't you believe it? Do you think you're 
as obvious as a poached egg on a piece of toast, 
like the poor lunatic? Not a bit of it, dear 
reader. You've got a solar plexus, and a lumbar 
ganglion not far from your liver, and I'm going 
to tell everybody. Nothing brings a man home 
to himself like telling everybody. And I will 



THE HOLY FAMILY 17 

drive you home to yourself, do you hear? 
You've been poaching in my private atmospheric 
grounds long enough, identifying yourself with 
me and me with everybody. A nice row there'd 
be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the 
tail and said, "Look here, you're not to look so 
green, you damm dog-star! It's an offense 
against star-regulations." 

Which reminds me that the Arabs say the 
shooting stars, meteorites, are starry stones which 
the angels fling at the poaching demons whom 
they catch sight of prowling too near the pali- 
sades of heaven. I must say I like Arab angels. 
My heaven would coruscate like a Catherine 
wheel, with white-hot star-stones. Away, you 
dog, you prowling cur. — Got him under the 
left ear-hole, Gabriel — ! See him, see him, 
Michael? That hopeful blue devil! Land him 
one! Biff on your bottom, you hoper. 

But I wish the Arabs wouldn't entice me, or 
you, dear reader, provoke me to this. I feel with 
you, dear reader, as I do with a deaf-man when 
he pushes his vulcanite ear, his listening ma- 
chine, towards my mouth. I want to shout down 
the telephone ear-hole all kinds of improper 
things, to see what effect they will have on the 
stupid dear face at the end of the coil of wire. 



18 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

After all, words must be very different after 
they've trickled round and round a long wire 
coil. Whatever becomes of them! And I, who 
am a bit deaf myself, and may in the end have a 
deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill be- 
comes me to be so unkind, yet that's how I feel. 
So there we are. 

Help me to be serious, dear reader. 

In that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the 
Unconscious," I tried rather wistfully to con- 
vince you, dear reader, that you had a solar 
plexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other 
things. I don't know why I took the trouble. 
If a fellow doesn't believe he's got a nose, the 
best way to convince him is gently to waft a little 
pepper into his nostrils. And there was I paint- 
ing my own nose purple, and wistfully inviting 
you to look and believe. No more, though. 

You've got first and foremost a solar plexus, 
dear reader; and the solar plexus is a great nerve 
center which lies behind your stomach. I can't 
be accused of impropriety or untruth, because 
any book of science or medicine which deals 
with the nerve-system of the human body will 
show it to you quite plainly. So don't wriggle 
or try to look spiritual. Because ; willy-nilly, 
you've got a solar plexus, dear reader, among 



THE HOLY FAMILY 19 

other things. I'm writing a good sound science 
book, which there's no gainsaying. 

Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of read- 
ers, is where you are you. It is your first and 
greatest and deepest center of consciousness. If 
you want to know how conscious and when con- 
scious, I must refer you to that little book, 
"Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." 

At your solar plexus you are primarily con- 
scious: there, behind you stomach. There 
you have the profound and pristine conscious 
awareness that you are you. Don't say you 
haven't. I know you have. You might as well 
try to deny the nose on your face. There is your 
first and deepest seat of awareness. There you 
are triumphantly aware of your own individual 
existence in the universe. Absolutely there is 
the keep and central stronghold of your trium- 
phantly-conscious self. There you are, and you 
know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my 
dear, with a Me voilh. With a Here I ami 
With an Ecco mi! With a Da bin ich! There 
you are, dearie. 

But not only a triumphant awareness that 
There you are. An exultant awareness also that 
outside this quiet gate, this navel, lies a whole 
universe on which you can lay tribute. Aha — 



20 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

at birth you closed the central gate for ever. 
Too dangerous to leave it open. Too near the 
quick. But there are other gates. There are 
eyes and mouths and ears and nostrils, besides 
the two lower gates of the passionate body, and 
the closed but not locked gates of the breasts. 
Many gates. And besides the actual gates, the 
marvelous wireless communication between the 
great center and the surrounding or contiguous 
world. 

Authorized science tells you that this first 
great plexus, this all-potent nerve-center of con- 
sciousness and dynamic life-activity is a sym- 
pathetic center. From the solar plexus as from 
your castle-keep you look around and see the fair 
lands smiling, the corn and fruit and cattle of 
your increase, the cottages of your dependents 
and the halls of your beloveds. From the solar 
plexus you know that all the world is yours, and 
all is goodly. 

This is the great center, where in the womb, 
your life first sparkled in individuality. This is 
the center that drew the gestating maternal 
blood-stream upon you, in the nine-months lurk- 
ing, drew it on you for your increase. This is 
the center whence the navel-string broke, but 
where the invisible string of dynamic conscious- 



THE HOLY FAMILY 21 

ness, like a dark electric current connecting you 
with the rest of life, will never break until you 
die and depart from corporate individuality. 

They say, by the way, that doctors now per- 
form a little operation on the born baby, so that 
no more navel shows. No more belly-buttons, 
dear reader! Lucky I caught you this genera- 
tion, before the doctors had saved your appear- 
ances. Yet, cava mio, whether it shows or not, 
there you once had immediate connection with 
the maternal blood-stream. And, because the 
male nucleus which derived from the father 
still lies sparkling and potent within the solar 
plexus, therefore that great nerve-center of you, 
still has immediate knowledge of your father, 
a subtler but still vital connection. We call it 
the tie of blood. So be it. It is a tie of blood. 
But much more definite than we imagine. For 
true it is that the one bright male germ which 
went to your begetting was drawn from the 
blood of the father. And true it is that that 
same bright male germ lies unquenched and 
unquenchable at the center of you, within the 
famous solar plexus. And furthermore true is 
that this unquenched father-spark within you 
sends forth vibrations and dark currents of vital 
activity all the time ; connecting direct with your 



22 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

father. You will never be able to get away from 
it while you live. 

The connection with the mother may be more 
obvious. Is there not your ostensible navel, 
where the rupture between you and her took 
place? But because the mother-child relation 
is more plausible and flagrant, is that any rea- 
son for supposing it deeper, more vital, more in- 
trinsic? Not a bit. Because if the large parent 
mother-germ still lives and acts vividly and mys- 
teriously in the great fused nucleus of your solar 
plexus, does the smaller, brilliant male-spark 
that derived from your father act any less viv- 
idly? By no means. It is different — it is less 
ostensible. It may be even in magnitude smaller. 
But it may be even more vivid, even more in- 
trinsic. So beware how you deny the father- 
quick of yourself. You may be denying the most 
intrinsic quick of all. 

In the same way it follows that, since brothers 
and sisters have the same father and mother, 
therefore in every brother and sister there is a 
direct communication such as can never happen 
between strangers. The parent nuclei do not die 
within the new nucleus. They remain there, 
marvelous naked sparkling dynamic life-centers, 
nodes, well-heads of vivid life itself. Therefore 



THE HOLY FAMILY 23 

in every individual the parent nuclei live, and 
give direction connection, blood connection we 
call it, with the rest of the family. It is blood 
connection. For the fecundating nuclei are the 
very spark-essence of the blood. And while life 
lives the parent nuclei maintain their own cen- 
trality and dynamic effectiveness within the solar 
plexus of the child. So that every individual has 
mother and father both sparkling within himself. 
But this is rather a preliminary truth than an 
intrinsic truth. The intrinsic truth of every 
individual is the new unit of unique individuality 
which emanates from the fusion of the parent 
nuclei. This is the incalculable and intangible 
Holy Ghost each time — each individual his own 
Holy Ghost. When, at the moment of concep- 
tion, the two parent nuclei fuse to form a new 
unit of life, then takes place the great mystery 
of creation. A new individual appears- — not the 
result of the fusion merely. Something more. 
The quality of individuality cannot be derived. 
The new individual, in his singleness of self, is a 
perfectly new whole. He is not a permutation 
and combination of old elements, transferred 
through the parents. No, he is something unde- 
rived and utterly unprecedented, unique, a new 
soul. 



24 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

This quality of pure individuality is, however, 
only the one supreme quality. It consummates 
all other qualities, but does not consume them. 
All the others are there, all the time. And only 
at his maximum does an individual surpass all 
his derivative elements, and become purely him- 
self. And most people never get there. In his 
own pure individuality a man surpasses his 
father and mother, and is utterly unknown to 
them. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" 
But this does not alter the fact that within him 
lives the mother-quick and the father-quick, and 
that though in his wholeness he is rapt away 
beyond the old mother-father connections, they 
are still there within him, consummated but not 
consumed. Nor does it alter the fact that very 
few people surpass their parents nowadays, and 
attain any individuality beyond them. Most 
men are half-born slaves : the little soul they are 
born with just atrophies, and merely the organ- 
ism emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new 
swells into manhood, like big potatoes. 

So there we are. But considering man at his 
best, he is at the start faced with the great prob- 
lem. At the very start he has to undertake his 
tripartite being, the mother within him, the 
father within him, and the Holy Ghost, the self 



THE HOLY FAMILY 25 

which he is supposed to consummate, and which 
mostly he doesn't. 

And there it is, a hard physiological fact. At 
the moment of our conception, the father nucleus 
fuses with the mother nucleus, and the wonder 
emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new 
individual cell. But in the new individual cell 
the father-germ and the mother-germ do not 
relinquish their identity. There they remain 
still, incorporated and never extinguished. And 
so, the blood-stream of race is one stream, for 
ever. But the moment the mystery of pure indi- 
vidual newness ceased to be enacted and fulfilled, 
the blood-stream would dry up and be finished. 
Mankind would die out. 

Let us go back then to the solar plexus. There 
sparkle the included mother-germ and father- 
germ, giving us direct, immediate blood-bonds, 
family connection. The connection is as direct 
and as subtle as between the Marconi stations, 
two great wireless stations. A family, if you 
like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted 
to the same, or very much the same vibration. 
All the time they quiver with the interchange, 
there is one long endless flow of vitalistic com- 
munication between members of one family, a 
long, strange rapport, a. sort of life-unison. It is 



26 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

a ripple of life through many bodies as through 
one body. But all the time there is the jolt, the 
rupture of individualism, the individual assert- 
ing himself beyond all ties or claims. The high- 
est goal for every man is the goal of pure indi- 
vidual being. But it is a goal you cannot reach 
by the mere rupture of all ties. A child isn't 
born by being torn from the womb. When it is 
born by natural process that is rupture enough. 
But even then the ties are not broken. They are 
only subtilized. 

From the solar plexus first of all pass the great 
vitalistic communications between child and par- 
ents, the first interplay of primal, pre-mental 
knowledge and sympathy. It is a great subtle 
interplay, and from this interplay the child is 
built up, body and psyche. Impelled from the 
primal conscious center in the abdomen, the 
child seeks the mother, seeks the breast, opens a 
blind mouth and gropes for the nipple. Not 
mentally directed and yet certainly directed. 
Directed from the dark pre-mind center of the 
solar plexus. From this center the child seeks, 
the mother knows. Hence the true mindlessness 
of the pristine, healthy mother. She does not 
need to think, mentally to know. She knows so 



THE HOLY FAMILY 27 

profoundly and actively at the great abdominal 
life-center. 

But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it 
then know the mother alone? To an infant the 
mother is the whole universe. Yet the child 
needs more than the mother. It needs as well the 
presence of men, the vibration from the present 
body of the man. There may not be any actual, 
palpable connection. But from the great volun- 
tary center in the man pass unknowable com- 
munications and untellable nourishment of the 
stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, 
and which so far we have refused to know, but 
none the less essential, quickening dark rays 
which pass from the great dark abdominal life- 
center in the father to the corresponding center in 
the child. And these rays, these vibrations, are 
not like the mother-vibrations. Far, far from it. 
They do not need the actual contact, the handling 
and the caressing. On the contrary, the true 
male instinct is to avoid physical contact with a 
baby. It may not need even actual presence. But 
present or absent, there should be between the 
baby and the father that strange, intangible com- 
munication, that strange pull and circuit such as 
the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a 
vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life- 



28 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

plasm of the baby into the line of vital quicken- 
ing, strength, knowing. And any lack of this 
vital circuit, this vital interchange between 
father and child, man and child, means an inev- 
itable impoverishment to the infant 

The child exists in the interplay of two great 
life-waves, the womanly and the male. In ap- 
pearance, the mother is everything. In truth, 
the father has actively very little part. It does 
not matter much if he hardly sees his child. Yet 
see it he should, sometimes, and touch it some- 
times, and renew with it the connection, the life- 
circuit, not allow it to lapse, and so vitally starve 
his child. 

But remember, dear reader, please, that there 
is not the slightest need for you to believe me, or 
even read me. Remember, it's just your own 
affair. Don't implicate me. 



CHAPTER III 

PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON 

THE primal consciousness in man is pre- 
mental, and has nothing to do with cogni- 
tion. It is the same as in the animals. And this 
pre-mental consciousness remains as long as we 
live the powerful root and body of our conscious- 
ness. The mind is but the last flower, the 
cul de sac. 

The first seat of our primal consciousness is 
the solar plexus, the great nerve-center situated 
behind the stomach. From this center we are 
first dynamically conscious. For the primal 
consciousness is always dynamic, and never, like 
mental consciousness, static. Thought, let us 
say what we will about its magic powers, is 
instrumental only, the soul's finest instrument 
for the business of living. Thought is just a 
means to action and living. But life and action 
take rise actually at the great centers of dynamic 
consciousness. 

The solar plexus, the greatest and most impor- 

29 



30 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

tant center of our dynamic consciousness, is a 
sympathetic center. At this main center of your 
first-mind we know as we can never mentally 
know. Primarily we know, each man, each liv- 
ing creature knows, profoundly and satisfacto- 
rily and without question, that / am I. This root 
of all knowledge and being is established in the 
solar plexus; it is dynamic, pre-mental knowl- 
edge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. 
Do not ask me to transfer the pre-mental dy- 
namic knowledge into thought. It cannot be 
done. The knowledge that I am I can never be 
thought : only known. 

This being the very first term of our life- 
knowledge, a knowledge established physically 
and psychically the moment the two parent nu- 
clei fused, at the moment of the conception, it 
remains integral as a piece of knowledge in every 
subsequent nucleus derived from this one orig- 
inal. But yet the original nucleus, formed from 
the two parent nuclei at our conception, remains 
always primal and central, and is always the 
original fount and home of the first and supreme 
knowledge that I am I. This original nucleus 
is embodied in the solar plexus. 

But the original nucleus divides. The first 
division, as science knows, is a division of recoil, 



PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON 31 

From the perfect oneing of the two parent nu- 
clei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new asser- 
tion. That which was perfect one now divides 
again, and in the recoil becomes again two. 

This second nucleus, the nucleus born of re- 
coil, is the nuclear origin of all the great nuclei 
of the voluntary system, which are the nuclei of 
assertive individualism. And it remains central 
in the adult human body as it was in the egg-cell. 
In the adult human body the first nucleus of in- 
dependence, first-born from the great original 
nucleus of our conception, lies always established 
in the lumbar ganglion. Here we have our pos- 
itive center of independence, in a multifarious 
universe. 

At the solar plexus, the dynamic knowledge is 
this, that I am I. The solar plexus is the center 
of all the sympathetic system. The great prime 
knowledge is sympathetic in nature. I am I, in 
vital centrality. I am I, the vital center of all 
things. I am I, the clew to the whole. All is one 
with me. It is the one identity. 

But at the lumbar ganglion, which is the 
center of separate identity, the knowledge is of a 
different mode, though the term is the same. At 
the lumbar ganglion I know that I am I, in dis- 
tinction from a whole universe, which is not as I 



32 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

am. This is the first tremendous flash of knowl- 
edge of singleness and separate identity. I am I, 
not because I am at one with all the universe, 
but because I am other than all the universe. It 
is my distinction from all the rest of things which 
makes me myself. Because I am set utterly apart 
and distinguished from all that is the rest of the 
universe, therefore / am I. And this root of our 
knowledge in separateness lies rooted all the time 
in the lumbar ganglion. It is the second term of 
our dynamic psychic existence. 

It is from the great sympathetic center of the 
solar plexus that the child rejoices in the mother 
and in its own blissful centrality, its unison with 
the as yet unknown universe. Look at the pic- 
tures of Madonna and Child, and you will even 
see it. It is from this center that it draws all 
things unto itself, winningly, drawing love for 
the soul, and actively drawing in milk. The 
same center controls the great intake of love and 
of milk, of psychic and of physical nourishment. 

And it is from the great voluntary center of 
the lumbar ganglion that the child asserts its 
distinction from the mother, the single identity 
of its own existence, and its power over its sur- 
roundings. From this center issues the violent 
little pride and lustiness which kicks with glee, 



PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON 33 

or crows with tiny exultance in its own being, or 
which claws the breast with a savage little 
rapacity, and an incipient masterfulness of 
which every mother is aware. This incipient 
mastery, this sheer joy of a young thing in its 
own single existence, the marvelous playfulness 
of early youth, and the roguish mockery of the 
mother's love, as well as the bursts of temper and 
rage, all belong to infancy. And all this flashes 
spontaneously, must flash spontaneously from the 
first great center of independence, the powerful 
lumbar ganglion, great dynamic center of all the 
voluntary system, of all the spirit of pride and 
joy in independent existence. And it is from 
this center too that the milk is urged away down 
the infant bowels, urged away towards excretion. 
The motion is the same, but here it applies to 
the material, not to the vital relation. It is from 
the lumbar ganglion that the dynamic vibrations 
are emitted which thrill from the stomach and 
bowels, and promote the excremental function 
of digestion. It is the solar plexus which con- 
trols the assimilatory function in digestion. 

So, in the first division of the egg-cell is set up 
the first plane of psychic and physical life, re- 
maining radically the same throughout the 
whole existence of the individual. The two 



34 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

original nuclei of the egg-cell remain the same 
two original nuclei within the corpus of the 
adult individual. Their psychic and their phys- 
ical dynamic is the same in the solar plexus and 
lumbar ganglion as in the two nuclei of the egg- 
cell. The first great division in the egg remains 
always the same, the unchanging great division 
in the psychic and the physical structure; the un- 
changing great division in knowledge and func- 
tion. It is a division into polarized duality, psy- 
chical and physical, of the human being. It is 
the great vertical division of the egg-cell, and of 
the nature of man. 

Then, this division having taken place, there 
is a new thrill of conjunction or collision be- 
tween the divided nuclei, and at once the second 
birth takes place. The two nuclei now split 
horizontally. There is a horizontal division 
across the whole egg-cell, and the nuclei are now 
four, two above, and two below. But those be- 
low retain their original nature, those above are 
new in nature. And those above correspond 
again to those below. 

In the developed child, the great horizontal 
division of the egg-cell, resulting in four nuclei, 
this remains the same. The horizontal division- 
wall is the diaphragm. The two upper nuclei 



PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON 35 

are the two great nerve-centers, the cardiac 
plexus and the thoracic ganglion. We have 
again a sympathetic center primal in activity 
and knowledge, and a corresponding voluntary 
center. In the center of the breast, the cardiac 
plexus acts as the great sympathetic mode of new 
dynamic activity, new dynamic consciousness. 
And near the spine, by the wall of the shoulders, 
the thoracic ganglion acts as the powerful volun- 
tary center of separateness and power, in the 
same vertical line as the lumbar ganglion, but 
horizontally so different. 

Now we must change our whole feeling. We 
must put off the deep way of understanding 
which belongs to the lower body of our nature, 
and transfer ourselves into the upper plane, 
where being and functioning are different. 

At the cardiac plexus, there in the center of 
the breast, we have now a new great sun of 
knowledge and being. Here there is no more 
of self. Here there is no longer the dark, ex- 
ultant knowledge that I am I. A change has 
come. Here I know no more of myself. Here 
I am not. Here I only know the delightful rev- 
elation that you are you. The wonder is no 
longer within me, my own dark, centrifugal, 
exultant self. The wonder is without me. The 



36 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

wonder is outside me. And I can no longer 
exult and know myself the dark, central sun of 
the universe. Now I look with wonder, with 
tenderness, with joyful yearning towards that 
which is outside me, beyond me, not me. Behold, 
that which was once negative has now become 
the only positive. The other being is now the 
great positive reality, I myself am as nothing. 
Positivity has changed places. 

If we want to see the portrayed look, then we 
must turn to the North, to the fair, wondering, 
blue-eyed infants of the Northern masters. They 
seem so frail, so innocent and wondering, touch- 
ing outwards to the mystery. They are not the 
same as the Southern child, nor the opposite. 
Their whole life mystery is different. Instead 
of consummating all things within themselves, 
as the dark little Southern infants do, the North- 
ern Jesus-children reach out delicate little hands 
of wondering innocence towards delicate, flower- 
reverential mothers. Compare a Botticelli Ma- 
donna, with all her wounded and abnegating sen- 
suality, with a Hans Memling Madonna, whose 
soul is pure and only reverential. Beyond me 
is the mystery and the glory, says the Northern 
mother : let me have no self, let me only seek that 
which is all-pure, all-wonderful. But the South- 



PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON 37 

ern mother says : This is mine, this is mine, this 
is my child, my wonder, my master, my lord, my 
scourge, my own. 

From the cardiac plexus the child goes forth 
in bliss. It seeks the revelation of the unknown. 
It wonderingly seeks the mother. It opens its 
small hands and spreads its small fingers to touch 
her. And bliss, bliss, bliss, it meets the wonder 
in mid-air and in mid-space it finds the loveliness 
of the mother's face. It opens and shuts its little 
fingers with bliss, it laughs the wonderful, self- 
less laugh of pure baby-bliss, in the first ecstasy 
of finding all its treasure, groping upon it and 
finding it in the dark. It opens wide, child-wide 
eyes to see, to see. But it cannot see. It is 
puzzled, it wrinkles its face. But when the 
mother puts her face quite near, and laughs and 
coos, then the baby trembles with an ecstasy of 
love. The glamour, the wonder, the treasure 
beyond. The great uplift of rapture. All this 
surges from that first center of the breast, the 
sun of the breast, the cardiac plexus. 

And from the same center acts the great func- 
tion of the heart and breath. Ah, the aspiration, 
the aspiration, like a hope, like a yearning con- 
stant and unfailing with which we take in breath. 
When we breathe, when we take in breath, it is 



38 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

not as when we take in food. When we breathe 
in we aspire, we yearn towards the heaven of air 
and light. And when the heart dilates to draw 
in the stream of dark blood, it opens its arms as 
to a beloved. It dilates with reverent joy, as a 
host opening his doors to an honored guest, 
whom he delights to serve : opening his doors to 
the wonder which comes to him from beyond, 
and without which he were nothing. 

So it is that our heart dilates, our lungs ex- 
pand. They are bidden by that great and myste- 
rious impulse from- the cardiac plexus, which 
bids them seek the mystery and the fulfillment 
of the beyond. They seek the beyond, the air of 
the sky, the hot blood from the dark under- 
world. And so we live. 

And then, they relax, they contract. They are 
driven by the opposite motion from the power- 
ful voluntary center of the thoracic ganglion. 
That which was drawn in, was invited, is now 
relinquished, allowed to go forth, negatively. 
Not positively dismissed, but relinquished. 

There is a wonderful complementary duality 
between the voluntary and the sympathetic ac- 
tivity on the same plane. But between the two 
planes, upper and lower, there is a further dual- 
ism, still more startling, perhaps. Between the 



PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON 39 

dark, glowing first term of knowledge at the 
solar plexus: / am I, all is one in me; and the 
first term of volitional knowledge : / am myself, 
and these others are not as I am; — there is a 
world of difference. But when the world changes 
again, and on the upper plane we realize the 
wonder of other things, the difference is almost 
shattering. The thoracic ganglion is a ganglion 
of power. When the child in its delicate bliss 
seeks the mother and finds her and is added on to 
her, then it fulfills itself in the great upper sym- 
pathetic mode. But then it relinquishes her. It 
ceases to be aware of her. And if she tries to 
force its love to play upon her again, like light 
revealing her to herself, then the child turns 
away. Or it will lie, and look at her with the 
strange, odd, curious look of knowledge, like a 
little imp who is spying her out. This is the 
curious look that many mothers cannot bear. In- 
voluntarily it arouses a sort of hate in them — the 
look of scrutinizing curiosity, apart, and as it 
were studying, balancing them up. Yet it is a 
look which comes into every child's eyes. It is 
the reaction of the great voluntary plexus be- 
tween the shoulders. The mother is suddenly 
set apart, as an object of curiosity, -coldly, some- 



4 o FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

times dreamily, sometimes puzzled, sometimes 
mockingly observed. 

Again, if a mother neglect her child, it cries, 
it weeps for her love and attention. Its pitiful 
lament is one of the forms of compulsion from 
the upper center. This insistence on pity, on 
love, is quite different from the rageous weep- 
ing, which is compulsion from the lower center, 
below the diaphragm. Again, some children 
just drop everything they can lay hands on over 
the edge of their crib, or their table. They drop 
everything out of sight. And then they look up 
with a curious look of negative triumph. This 
is again a form of recoil from the upper center, 
the obliteration of the thing which is outside. 
And here a child is acting quite differently from 
the child who joyously smashes. The desire to 
smash comes from the lower centers. 

We can quite well recognize the will exerted 
from the lower center. We call it headstrong 
temper and masterfulness. But the peculiar 
will of the upper center — the sort of nervous, 
critical objectivity, the deliberate forcing of 
sympathy, the play upon pity and tenderness, the 
plaintive bullying of love, or the benevolent 
bullying of love — these we don't care to recog- 
nize. They are the extravagance of spiritual 



PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON 41 

will. But in its true harmony the thoracic gan- 
glion is a center of happier activity: of real, 
eager curiosity, of the delightful desire to pick 
things to pieces, and the desire to put them to- 
gether again, the desire to "find out," and the de- 
sire to invent: all this arises on the upper plane, 
at the volitional center of the thoracic ganglion. 



CHAPTER IV 

TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 

OH, damn the miserable baby with its com- 
plicated ping-pong table of an uncon- 
scious. I'm sure, dear reader, you'd rather have 
to listen to the brat howling in its crib than to 
me expounding its plexuses. As for "mixing 
those babies up," I'd mix him up like a shot if 
I'd anything to mix him with. Unfortunately 
he's my own anatomical specimen of a pickled 
rabbit, so there's nothing to be done with the bits. 

But he gets on my nerves. I come out sol- 
emnly with a pencil and an exercise book, and 
take my seat in all gravity at the foot of a large 
fir-tree, and wait for thoughts to come, gnawing 
like a squirrel on a nut. But the nut's hollow. 

I think there are too many trees. They seem to 

crowd round and stare at me, and I feel as if 

they nudged one another when I'm not looking. 

I can feel them standing there. And they won't 

let me get on about the baby this morning. Just 

their cussedness. I felt they encouraged me like 

a harem of wonderful silent wives, yesterday. 

42 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 43 

It is half rainy too — the wood so damp and 
still and so secret, in the remote morning air. 
Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest 
subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than 
a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The 
trees seem so much bigger than me, so much 
stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem 
to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, 
and they overwhelm me. Ah, well, the only 
thing is to give way to them. 

It is the edge of the Black Forest — sometimes 
the Rhine far off, on its Rhine plain, like a bit of 
magnesium ribbon. But not to-day. To-day only 
trees, and leaves, and vegetable presences. Huge 
straight fir-trees, and big beech-trees sending riv- 
ers of roots into the ground. And cuckoos, like 
noise falling in drops off the leaves. And me, a 
fool, sitting by a grassy wood-road with a pencil 
and a book, hoping to write more about that 
baby. 

Never mind. I listen again for noises, and I 
smell the damp moss. The looming trees, so 
straight. And I listen for their silence. Big, 
tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent 
cruelty about them. Or barbarity. I don't know 
why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent, 
strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear 



44 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

the slow, powerful sap drumming in their 
trunks. Great full-blooded trees, with strange 
tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming. 

Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. 
Yet the powerful sap-scented blood roaring up 
the great columns. A vast individual life, and an 
overshadowing will. The will of a tree. Some- 
thing that frightens you. 

Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? 
You can't. It hasn't got a face. You look at the 
strong body of a trunk : you look above you into 
the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs: you 
see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to 
look into, you can't meet its gaze. You keep on 
looking at it in part and parcel. 

It's no good looking at a tree, to know it. The 
only thing is to sit among the roots and nestle 
against its strong trunk, and not bother. That's 
how I write all about these planes and plexuses, 
between the toes of a tree, forgetting myself 
against the great ankle of the trunk. And then, 
as a rule, as a squirrel is stroked into its wicked- 
ness by the faceless magic of a tree, so am I 
usually stroked into forgetfulness, and into 
scribbling this book. My tree-book, really. 

I come so well to understand tree-worship. 
All the old Aryans worshiped the tree. My 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 45 

ancestors. The tree of life. The tree of knowl- 
edge. Well, one is bound to sprout out some 
time or other, chip of the old Aryan block. I 
can so well understand tree-worship. And fear 
the deepest motive. 

Naturally. This marvelous vast individual 
without a face, without lips or eyes or heart. 
This towering creature that never had a face. 
Here am I between his toes like a pea-bug, and 
him noiselessly over-reaching me. And I feel 
his great blood-jet surging. And he has no eyes. 
But he turns two ways. He thrusts himself tre- 
mendously down to the middle earth, where dead 
men sink in darkness, in the damp, dense under- 
soil, and he turns himself about in high air. 
Whereas we have eyes on one side of our head 
only, and only grow upwards. 

Plunging himself down into the black humus, 
with a root's gushing zest, where we can only 
rot dead; and his tips in high air, where we can 
only look up to. So vast and powerful and ex- 
ultant in his two directions. And all the time, 
he has no face, no thought: only a huge, savage, 
thoughtless soul. Where does he even keep his 
soul? — Where does anybody? 

A huge, plunging, tremendous soul. I would 
like to be a tree for a while. The great lust of 



46 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He 
towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him 
towering round me. I used to be afraid. I used 
to fear their lust, their rushing black lust. But 
now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them 
huge primeval enemies. But now they are 
my only shelter and strength. I lose my- 
self among the trees. I am so glad to be 
with them in their silent, intent passion, and 
their great lust. They feed my soul. But I can 
understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree. 

And I can so well understand the Romans, 
their terror of the bristling Hercynian wood. 
Yet when you look from a height down upon the 
rolling of the forest — this Black Forest — it is as 
suave as a rolling, oily sea. Inside only, it 
bristles horrific. And it terrified the Romans. 

The Romans! They too seem very near. 
Nearer than Hindenburg or Foch or even Napo- 
leon. When I look across the Rhine plain, it is 
Rome, and the legionaries of the Rhine that my 
soul notices. It must have been wonderful to 
come from South Italy to the shores of this sea- 
like forest: this dark, moist forest, with its enor- 
mously powerful intensity of tree life. Now I 
know, coming myself from rock-dry Sicily, open 
to the day. 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 47 

The Romans and the Greeks found everything 
human. Everything had a face, and a human 
voice. Men spoke, and their fountains piped an 
answer. 

But when the legions crossed the Rhine they 
found a vast impenetrable life which had no 
voice. They met the faceless silence of the Black 
Forest. This huge, huge wood did not answer 
when they called. Its silence was too crude and 
massive. And the soldiers shrank: shrank before 
the trees that had no faces, and no answer. A 
vast array of non-human life, darkly self-suffi- 
cient, and bristling with indomitable energy. 
The Hercynian wood, not to be fathomed. The 
enormous power of these collective trees, 
stronger in their somber life even than Rome. 

No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No 
wonder they thrilled with horror when, deep in 
the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of 
their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees 
had devoured them: silently, in mouthfuls, and 
left the white bones. Bones of the mindful Ro- 
mans — and savage, preconscious trees, indom- 
itable. The true German has something of the 
sap of trees in his veins even now : and a sort of 
pristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most 
powerful, under all his mentality. He is a tree- 



48 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

soul, and his gods are not human. His instinct 
still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred 
tree, deep in the forest. The tree of life and 
death, tree of good and evil, tree of abstraction 
and of immense, mindless life; tree of every- 
thing except the spirit, spirituality. 

But after bone-dry Sicily, and after the gib- 
bering of myriad people all rattling their per- 
sonalities, I am glad to be with the profound in- 
difference of faceless trees. Their rudimentari- 
ness cannot know why we care for the things we 
care for. They have no faces, no minds and 
bowels: only deep, lustful roots stretching in 
earth, and vast, lissome life in air, and primeval 
individuality. You can sacrifice the whole of 
your spirituality on their altar still. You can 
nail your skull on their limbs. They have no 
skulls, no minds nor faces, they can't make eyes 
of love at you. Their vast life dispenses with all 
this. But they will live you down. 

The normal life of one of these big trees is 
about a hundred years. So the Herr Baron 
told me. 

One of the few places that my soul will haunt, 
when I am dead, will be this. Among the trees 
here near Ebersteinburg, where I have been 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 49 

alone and written this book. I can't leave these 
trees. They have taken some of my soul. 



Excuse my digression, gentle reader. At first 
I left it out, thinking we might not see wood for 
trees. But it doesn't much matter what we see. 
It's nice just to look round, anywhere. 

So there are two planes of being and con- 
sciousness and two modes of relation and of func- 
tion. We will call the lower plane the sensual, 
the upper the spiritual. The terms may be un- 
wise, but we can think of no other. 

Please read that again, dear reader; you'll be 
a bit dazzled, coming out of the wood. 

It is obvious that from the time a child is born, 
or conceived, it has a permanent relation with 
the outer universe, a relation in the two modes, 
not one mode only. There are two ways of love, 
two ways of activity in independence. And there 
needs some sort of equilibrium between the two 
modes. In the same way, in physical function 
there is eating and drinking, and excrementation, 
on the lower plane; and respiration and heart- 
beat on the upper plane. 

Now the equilibrium to be established is four- 
fold. There must be a true equilibrium between 
what we eat and what we reject again by excre- 



50 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

tion: likewise between the systole and diastole 
of the heart, the inspiration and expiration of 
our breathing. Suffice to say the equilibrium is 
never quite perfect. Most people are either too 
fat or too thin, too hot or too cold, too slow or too 
quick. There is no such thing as an actual norm, 
a living norm. A norm is merely an abstraction, 
not a reality. 

The same on the psychical plane. We either 
love too much, or impose our will too much, are 
too spiritual or too sensual. There is not and 
cannot be any actual norm of human conduct. 
All depends, first, on the unknown inward need 
within the very nuclear centers of the individual 
himself, and secondly on his circumstance. Some 
men must be too spiritual, some must be too sen- 
sual. Some must be too sympathetic, and some 
must be too proud. We have no desire to say 
what men ought to be. We only wish to say 
there are all kinds of ways of being, and there is 
no such thing as human perfection. No man can 
be anything more than just himself, in genuine 
living relation to all his surroundings. But that 
which I am, when I am myself, will certainly 
be anathema to those who hate individual integ- 
rity, and want to swarm. And that which I, be- 
ing myself, am in myself, may make the hair 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 51 

bristle with rage on a man who is also himself, 
but very different from me. Then let it bristle. 
And if mine bristle back again, then let us, if we 
must, fly at one another like two enraged men. It 
is how it should be. We've got to learn to live 
from the center of our own responsibility only, 
and let other people do the same. 

To return to the child, however, and his devel- 
opment on his two planes of consciousness. 
There is all the time a direct dynamic connec- 
tion between child and mother, child and father 
also, from the start. It is a connection on two 
planes, the upper and lower. From the lower 
sympathetic center the profound intake of love 
or vibration from the living co-respondent out- 
side. From the upper sympathetic center the 
outgoing of devotion and the passionate vibra- 
tion of given love, given attention. The two 
sympathetic centers are always, or should always 
be, counterbalanced by their corresponding vol- 
untary centers. From the great voluntary gan- 
glion of the lower plane, the child is self-willed, 
independent, and masterful. 

In the activity of this center a boy refuses to 
be kissed and pawed about, maintaining his 
proud independence like a little wild animal. 
From this center he likes to command and to 



52 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

receive obedience. From this center likewise 
he may be destructive and defiant and reckless, 
determined to have his own way at any cost. 

From this center, too, he learns to use his legs. 
The motion of walking, like the motion of 
breathing, is twofold. First, a sympathetic 
cleaving to the earth with the foot : then the vol- 
untary rejection, the spurning, the kicking away, 
the exultance in power and freedom. 

From the upper voluntary center the child 
watches persistently, wilfully, for the attention 
of the mother: to be taken notice of, to be 
caressed, in short to exist in and through the 
mother's attention. From this center, too, he 
coldly refuses to notice the mother, when she in- 
sists on too much attention. This cold refusal 
is different from the active rejection of the lower 
center. It is passive, but cold and negative. It 
is the great force of our day. From the ganglion 
of the shoulders, also, the child breathes and his 
heart beats. From the same center he learns the 
first use of his arms. In the gesture of sympathy, 
from the upper plane, he embraces his mother 
with his arms. In the motion of curiosity, or 
interest, which derives from the thoracic gan- 
glion, he spreads his fingers, touches, feels, ex- 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 53 

plores. In the motion of rejection he drops an 
undesired object deliberately out of sight 

And then, when the four centers of what we 
call the first field of consciousness are fully 
active, then it is that the eyes begin to gather 
their sight, the mouth to speak, the ears to awake 
to their intelligent hearings ; all as a result of the 
great fourfold activity of the first dynamic field 
of consciousness. And then also, as a result, the 
mind wakens to its impressions and to its incip- 
ient control. For at first the control is non- 
mental, even non-cerebral. The brain acts only 
as a sort of switchboard. 

The business of the father, in all this incipient 
child-development, is to stand outside as a final 
authority and make the necessary adjustments. 
Where there is too much sympathy, then the 
great voluntary centers of the spine are weak, 
the child tends to be delicate. Then the father 
by instinct supplies the roughness, the sternness 
which stiffens in the child the centers of resist- 
ance and independence, right from the very ear- 
liest days. Often, for a mere infant, it is the 
father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration of 
his voice, which starts the frictional and inde- 
pendent activity of the great voluntary ganglion 



54 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

and gives the first impulse to the independence 
which later on is life itself. 

But on the other hand, the father, from his 
distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child, 
and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful 
father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which 
is beyond mother-love. For in the male the 
dominant centers are naturally the volitional 
centers, centers of responsibility, authority, and 
care. 

It is the father's business, again, to maintain 
some sort of equilibrium between the two modes 
of love in his infant. A mother may wish to 
bring up her child from the lovely upper centers 
only, from the centers of the breast, in the mode 
of what we call pure or spiritual love. Then the 
child will be all gentle, all tender and tender- 
radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and for- 
bearance, always shielded from grossness or pain 
or roughness. Now the father's instinct is to be 
rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with the 
child, calling the deeper centers, the sensual 
centers, into play. "What do you want? My 
watch? Well, you can't have it, do you see, be- 
cause it's mine." Not a lot of explanations of the 
"You see, darling." No such nonsense. — Or if 
a child wails unnecessarily for its mother, the 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 55 

father must be the check. "Stop your noise, you 
little brat! What ails you, you whiner?" And 
if children be too sensitive, too sympathetic, then 
it will do the child no harm if the father oc- 
casionally throws the cat out of the window, or 
kicks the dog, or raises a storm in the house. 
Storms there must be. And if the child is old 
enough and robust enough, it can occasionally 
have its bottom soundly spanked — by the father, 
if the mother refuses to perform that most neces- 
sary duty. For a child's bottom is made oc- 
casionally to be spanked. The vibration of the 
spanking acts direct upon the spinal nerve-sys- 
tem, there is a direct reciprocity and reaction, 
the spanker transfers his wrath to the great will- 
centers in the child, and these will-centers react 
intensely, are vivified and educated. 

On the other hand, given a mother who is too 
generally hard or indifferent, then it rests with 
the father to provide the delicate sympathy and 
the refined discipline. Then the father must 
show the tender sensitiveness of the upper mode. 
The sad thing to-day is that so few mothers have 
any deep bowels of love — or even the breast of 
love. What they have is the benevolent spiritual 
will, the will of the upper self. But the will is 
not love. And benevolence in a parent is a 



56 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

poison. It is bullying. In these circumstances 
the father must give delicate adjustment, and, 
above all, some warm, native love from the 
richer sensual self. 

The question of corporal punishment is im- 
portant. It is no use roughly smacking a shrink- 
ing, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is too 
shrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of 
good cheerfully to spank its posterior. Not bru- 
tally, not cruelly, but with real sound, good- 
natured exasperation. And let the adult take the 
full responsibility, half humorously, without 
apology or explanation. Let us avoid self-jus- 
tification at all costs. Real corporal punishments 
apply to the sensual plane. The refined punish- 
ments of the spiritual mode are usually much 
more indecent and dangerous than a good 
smack. The pained but resigned disapprobation 
of a mother is usually a very bad thing, much 
worse than the father's shouts of rage. And send- 
ings to bed, and no dessert for a week, and so on, 
are crueller and meaner than a bang on the head. 
When a parent gives his boy a beating, there is 
a living passionate interchange. But in these 
refined punishments, the parent suffers nothing 
and the child is deadened. The bullying of the 
refined, benevolent spiritual will is simply vit- 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 57 

riol to the soul. Yet parents administer it with 
all the righteousness of virtue and good inten- 
tion, sparing themselves perfectly. 

The point is here. If a child makes you so 
that you really want to spank it soundly, then 
soundly spank the brat. But know all the time 
what you are doing, and always be responsible 
for your anger. Never be ashamed of it, and 
never surpass it. The flashing interchange of 
anger between parent and child is part of the 
responsible relationship, necessary to growth. 
Again, if a child offends you deeply, so that you 
really can't communicate with it any more, then, 
while the hurt is deep, switch of! your connec- 
tion from the child, cut off your correspondence, 
your vital communion, and be alone. But never 
persist in such a state beyond the time when your 
deep hurt dies down. The only rule is, do what 
you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always 
act on your own responsibility sincerely. And 
have the courage of your own strong emotion. 
They enrichen the child's soul. 

For a child's primary education depends al- 
most entirely on its relation to its parents, 
brothers, and sisters. Between mother and child, 
father and child, the law is this : I, the mother, 
am myself alone : the child is itself alone. But 



58 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

there exists between us a vital dynamic relation, 
for which I, being the conscious one, am basic- 
ally responsible. So, as far as possible, there 
must be in me no departure from myself, lest I 
injure the preconscious dynamic relation. I must 
absolutely act according to my own true sponta- 
neous feeling. But, moreover, I must also have 
wisdom for myself and for my child. Always, 
always the deep wisdom of responsibility. And 
always a brave responsibility for the soul's own 
spontaneity. Love — what is love? We'd better 
get a new idea. Love is, in all, generous impulse 
— even a good spanking. But wisdom is some- 
thing else, a deep collectedness in the soul, a deep 
abiding by my own integral being, which makes 
me responsible, not for the child, but for my 
certain duties towards the child, and for main- 
taining the dynamic flow between the child and 
myself as genuine as possible : that is to say, not 
perverted by ideals or by my will. 

Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bully- 
ing. But what is bullying? It is a desire to 
superimpose my own will upon another person. 
Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily de- 
tected. What is more dangerous is ideal bully- 
ing. Bullying people into what is ideally good 
for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 59 

I seek to enact this ideal in the person of another. 
This is ideal bullying. A mother says that life 
should be all love, all delicacy and forbearance 
and gentleness. And she proceeds to spin a hate- 
ful sticky web of permanent forbearance, gentle- 
ness, hushedness around her naturally passionate 
and hasty child. This so foils the child as to 
make him half imbecile or criminal. I may have 
ideals if I like — even of love and forbearance 
and meekness. But I have no right to ask 
another to have these ideals. And to impose any 
ideals upon a child as it grows is almost criminal. 
It results in impoverishment and distortion and 
subsequent deficiency. In our day, most danger- 
ous is the love and benevolence ideal. It results 
in neurasthenia, which is largely a dislocation or 
collapse of the great voluntary centers, a de- 
rangement of the will. It is in us an insistence 
upon the one life-mode only, the spiritual mode. 
It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and 
a living a sort of half-life, almost entirely from 
the upper centers. Thence, since we live ter- 
ribly and exhaustively from the upper centers, 
there is a tendency now towards pthisis and neu- 
rasthenia of the heart. The great sympathetic 
center of the breast becomes exhausted, the 
lungs, burnt by the over-insistence of one way 



60 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

of life, become diseased, the heart, strained in 
one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful 
lower centers are no longer fully active, partic- 
ularly the great lumbar ganglion, which is the 
clue to our sensual passionate pride and inde- 
pendence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppres- 
sion. And it is this ganglion which holds the 
spine erect. So, weak-chested, round-shoul- 
dered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. 
It is the result of the all-famous love and char- 
ity ideal, an ideal now quite dead in its sym- 
pathetic activity, but still fixed and determined 
in its voluntary action. 

Let us beware and beware, and beware of hav- 
ing a high ideal for ourselves. But particularly 
let us beware of having an ideal for our chil- 
dren. So doing, we damn them. All we can 
have is wisdom. And wisdom is not a theory, it 
is a state of soul. It is the state wherein we 
know our wholeness and the complicate, mani- 
fold nature of our being. It is the state wherein 
we know the great relations which exist between 
us and our near ones. And it is the state which 
accepts full responsibility, first for our own 
souls, and then for the living dynamic relations 
wherein we have our being. It is no use expect- 
ing the other person to know. Each must know 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 61 

for himself. But nowadays men have even a 
stunt of pretending that children and idiots alone 
know best. This is a pretty piece of sophistry, 
and criminal cowardice, trying to dodge the life- 
responsibility which no man or woman can 
dodge without disaster. 

The only thing is to be direct. If a child has 
to swallow castor-oil, then say: "Child, you've 
got to swallow this castor-oil. It is necessary 
for your inside. I say so because it is true. So 
open your mouth. " Why try coaxing and logic 
and tricks with children? Children are more 
sagacious than we are. They twig soon enough 
if there is a flaw in our own intention and our 
own true spontaneity. And they play up to our 
bit of falsity till there is hell to pay. 

"You love mother, don't you, dear?" — Just a 
piece of indecent trickery of the spiritual will. 
The great emotions like love are unspoken. 
Speaking them is a sign of an indecent bullying 
will. 

"Poor pussy! You must love poor pussy!" 

What cant! What sickening cant! An appeal 
to love based on false pity. That's the way to 
inculcate a filthy pharisaic conceit into a child. — 
If the child ill-treats the cat, say: 

"Stop mauling that cat. It's got its own life 



62 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

to live, so let it live it." Then if the brat per- 
sists, give tit for tat. 

"What, you pull the cat's tail! Then I'll pull 
your nose, to see how you like it." And give his 
nose a proper hard pinch. 

Children must pull the cat's tail a little. Chil- 
dren must steal the sugar sometimes. They must 
occasionally spoil just the things one doesn't 
want them to spoil. And they must occasionally 
tell stories — tell a lie. Circumstances and life 
are such that we must all sometimes tell a lie: 
just as we wear trousers, because we don't choose 
that everybody shall see our nakedness. Moral- 
ity is a delicate act of adjustment on the soul's 
part, not a rule or a prescription. Beyond a cer- 
tain point the child shall not pull the cat's tail, 
or steal the sugar, or spoil the furniture, or tell 
lies. But I'm afraid you can't fix this certain 
soul's humor. And so it must. If at a sudden 
point you fly into a temper and thoroughly beat 
the boy for hardly touching the cat — well, that's 
life. All you've got to say to him is : "There, 
that'll serve you for all the times you have pulled 
her tail and hurt her." And he will feel out- 
raged, and so will you. But what does it matter? 
Children have an infinite understanding of the 
soul's passionate variabilities, and forgive even a 



BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS 63 

real injustice, if it was spontaneous and not in- 
tentional. They know we aren't perfect. What 
they don't forgive us is if we pretend we are: 
or if we bully. 



CHAPTER V 

THE FIVE SENSES 

SCIENCE is wretched in its treatment of the 
human body as a sort of complex mechan- 
ism made up of numerous little machines work- 
ing automatically in a rather unsatisfactory rela- 
tion to one another. The body is the total ma- 
chine; the various organs are the included 
machines; and the whole thing, given a start at 
birth, or at conception, trundles on by itself. The 
only god in the machine, the human will or in- 
telligence, is absolutely at the mercy of the 
machine. 

Such is the orthodox view. Soul, when it is 
allowed an existence at all, sits somewhat 
vaguely within the machine, never defined. If 
anything goes wrong with the machine, why, the 
soul is forgotten instantly. We summon the 
arch-mechanic of our day, the medicine-man. 
And a marvelous earnest fraud he is, doing his 
best. He is really wonderful as a mechanic of 
the human system. But the life within us fails 

6 4 



THE FIVE SENSES 65 

more and more, while we marvelously tinker at 
the engines. Doctors are not to blame. 

It is obvious that, even considering the human 
body as a very delicate and complex machine, 
you cannot keep such a machine running for one 
day without most exact central control. Still 
more is it impossible to consider the automatic 
evolution of such a machine. When did any 
machine, even a single spinning-wheel, automat- 
ically evolve itself? There was a god in the 
machine before the machine existed. 

So there we are with the human body. There 
must have been, and must be a central god in the 
machine of each animate corpus. The little soul 
of the beetle makes the beetle toddle. The little 
soul of the homo sapiens sets him on his two feet. 
Don't ask me to define the soul. You might as 
well ask a bicycle to define the young damsel 
who so whimsically and so god-like pedals her 
way along the highroad. A young lady skelter- 
ing off on her bicycle to meet her young man — 
why, what could the bicycle make of such a mys- 
tery, if you explained it till doomsday. Yet the 
bicycle wouldn't be spinning from Streatham to 
Croydon by itself. 

So we may as well settle down to the little god 
in the machine. We may as well call it the indi- 



66 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

vidual soul, and leave it there. It's as far as the 
bicycle would ever get, if it had to define Made- 
moiselle. But be sure the bicycle would not deny 
the existence of the young miss who seats herself 
in the saddle. Not like us, who try to pretend 
there is no one in the saddle. Why even the sun 
would no more spin without a rider than would 
a cycle-pedal. But, since we have innumerable 
planets to reckon with, in the spinning we must 
not begin to define the rider in terms of our own 
exclusive planet. Nevertheless, rider there is: 
even a rider of the many-wheeled universe. 

But let us leave the universe alone. It is too 
big a bauble for me. — Revenons. — At the start 
of me there is me. There is a mysterious little 
entity which is my individual self, the god who 
builds the machine and then makes his gay ex- 
cursion of seventy years within it. Now we are 
talking at the moment about the machine. For 
the moment we are the bicycle, and not the 
feather-brained cyclist. So that all we can do 
is to define the cyclist in terms of ourself. A 
bicycle could say: Here, upon my leather saddle, 
rests a strange and animated force, which I call 
the force of gravity, as being the one great force 
which controls my universe. And yet, on second 
thoughts, I must modify myself. This great 



THE FIVE SENSES 67 

force of gravity is not always in the saddle. 
Sometimes it just is not there — and I lean 
strangely against a wall. I have been even 
known to turn upside down, with my wheels in 
the air; spun by the same mysterious Miss. So 
that I must introduce a theory of Relativity. 
However, mostly, when I am awake and alive, 
she is in the saddle; or it is in the saddle, the 
mysterious force. And when it is in the saddle, 
then two subsidiary forces plunge and claw upon 
my two pedals, plunge and claw with inestimable 
power. And at the same time, a kind and myste- 
rious force sways my head-stock, sways most in- 
calculably, and governs my whole motion. This 
force is not a driving force, but a subtle directing 
force, beneath whose grip my bright steel body 
is flexible as a dipping highroad. Then let me 
not forget the sudden clutch of arrest upon my 
hurrying wheels. Oh, this is pain to me! While 
I am rushing forward, surpassing myself in an 
elan vital, suddenly the awful check grips my 
back wheel, or my front wheel, or both. Sud- 
denly there is a fearful arrest. My soul rushes 
on before my body, I feel myself strained, torn 
back. My fibers groan. Then perhaps the ten- 
sion relaxes. 

So the bicycle will continue to babble about 



68 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

itself. And it will inevitably wind up with a 
philosophy. "Oh, if only the great and divine 
force rested for ever upon my saddle, and if only 
the mysterious will which sways my steering 
gear remained in place for ever : then my pedals 
would revolve of themselves, and never cease, 
and no hideous brake should tear the perpetuity 
of my motions. Then, oh then I should be im- 
mortal. I should leap through the world for 
ever, and spin to infinity, till I was identified 
with the dizzy and timeless cycle-race of the 
stars and the great sun. . . ." 

Poor old bicycle. The very thought is enough 
to start a philanthropic society for the preven- 
tion of cruelty to bicycles. 

Well, then, our human body is the bicycle. 
And our individual and incomprehensible self is 
the rider thereof. And seeing that the universe 
is another bicycle riding full tilt, we are bound 
to suppose a rider for that also. But we needn't 
say what sort of rider. When I see a cockroach 
scuttling across the floor and turning up its tail 
I stand affronted, and think : A rum sort of rider 
you must have. You've no business to have such 
a rider, do you hear? — And when I hear the mo- 
notonous and plaintive cuckoo in the June woods, 
I think: Who the devil made that clock? — And 



THE FIVE SENSES 69 

when I see a politician making a fiery speech on 
a platform, and the crowd gawping, I think: 
Lord, save me — they've all got riders. But Holy 
Moses! you could never guess what was coming. 
— And so I shouldn't like, myself, to start guess- 
ing about the rider of the universe. I am all too 
flummoxed by the masquerade in the tourney 
round about me. 

We ourselves then : wisdom, like charity, be- 
gins at home. We've each of us got a rider in 
the saddle: an individual soul. Mostly it can't 
ride, and can't steer, so mankind is like squad- 
rons of bicycles running amok. We should 
every one fall of! if we didn't ride so thick that 
we hold each other up. Horrid nightmare! 

As for myself, I have a horror of riding en 
bloc. So I grind away uphill, and sweat my guts 
out, as they say. 

Well, well — my body is my bicycle : the whole 
middle of me is the saddle where sits the rider 
of my soul. And my front wheel is the cardiac 
plane, and my back wheel is the solar plexus. 
And the brakes are the voluntary ganglia. And 
the steering gear is my head. And the right 
and left pedals are the right and left dynamics 
of the body, in some way corresponding to the 
sympathetic and voluntary division. 



70 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

So that now I know more or less how my 
rider rides me, and from what centers controls 
me. That is, I know the points of vital contact 
between my rider and my machine : between my 
invisible and my visible self. I don't attempt to 
say what is my rider. A bicycle might as well 
try to define its young Miss by wriggling its 
handle-bars and ringing its bell. 

However, having more or less determined the 
four primary motions, we can see the further 
unfolding. In a child, the solar plexus and the 
cardiac plexus, with corresponding voluntary 
ganglia, are awake and active. From these 
centers develop the great functions of the body. 

As we have seen, it is the solar plexus, with 
the lumbar ganglion, which controls the great 
dynamic system, the functioning of the liver and 
the kidneys. Any excess in the sympathetic 
dynamism tends to accelerate the action of the 
liver, to cause fever and constipation. Any col- 
lapse of the sympathetic dynamism causes anae- 
mia. The sudden stimulating of the voluntary 
center may cause diarrhoea, and so on. But all 
this depends so completely on the polarized flow 
between the individual and the correspondent, 
between the child and mother, child and father, 
child and sisters or brothers or teacher, or cir- 



THE FIVE SENSES 71 

cumambient universe, that it is impossible to lay 
down laws, unless we state particulars. Never- 
theless, the whole of the great organs of the 
lower body are controlled from the two lower 
centers, and these organs work well or ill accord- 
ing as there is a true dynamic psychic activity 
at the two primary centers of consciousness. By 
a true dynamic psychic activity we mean an ac- 
tivity which is true to the individual himself, to 
his own peculiar soul-nature. And a dynamic 
psychic activity means a dynamic polarity be- 
tween the individual himself and other individ- 
uals concerned in his living; or between him and 
his immediate surroundings, human, physical, 
geographical. 

On the upper plane, the lungs and heart are 
controlled from the cardiac plane and the 
thoracic ganglion. Any excess in the sympa- 
thetic mode from the upper centers tends to 
burn the lungs with oxygen, weaken them with 
stress, and cause consumption. So it is just 
criminal to make a child too loving. No child 
should be induced to love too much. It means 
derangement and death at last. 

But beyond the primary physiological func- 
tion — and it is the business of doctors to discover 
the relation between the functioning of the 



72 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

primary organs and the dynamic psychic activity 
at the four primary consciousness-centers, — be- 
yond these physical functions, there are the 
activities which are half-psychic, half-func- 
tional. Such as the five senses. 

Of the five senses, four have their function- 
ing in the face-region. The fifth, the sense of 
touch, is distributed all over the body. But all 
have their roots in the four great primary cen- 
ters of consciousness. From the constellation 
of your nerve-nodes, from the great field of your 
poles, the nerves run out in every direction, end- 
ing on the surface of the body. Inwardly this 
is an inextricable ramification and communica- 
tion. 

And yet the body is planned out in areas, there 
is a definite area-control from the four centers. 
On the back the sense of touch is not acute. 
There the voluntary centers act in resistance. 
But in the front of the body, the breast is one 
great field of sympathetic touch, the belly is an- 
other. On these two fields the stimulus of touch 
is quite different, has a quite different psychic 
quality and psychic result. The breast-touch is 
the fine alertness of quivering curiosity, the 
belly-touch is a deep thrill of delight and 
avidity. Correspondingly, the hands and arms 



THE FIVE SENSES 73 

are instruments of superb delicate curiosity, and 
deliberate execution. Through the elbows and 
the wrists flows the dynamic psychic current, 
and a dislocation in the current between two in- 
dividuals will cause a feeling of dislocation at 
the wrists and elbows. On the lower plane, the 
legs and feet are instruments of unfathomable 
gratifications and repudiations. The thighs, the 
knees, the feet are intensely alive with love- 
desire, darkly and superbly drinking in the love- 
contact, blindly. Or they are the great centers 
of resistance, kicking, repudiating. Sudden 
flushing of great general sympathetic desire will 
make a man feel weak at the knees. Hatred will 
harden the tension of the knees like steel, and 
grip the feet like talons. Thus the fields of 
touch are four, two sympathetic fields in front 
of the body from the throat to the feet, two re- 
sistant fields behind from the neck to the heels. 

There are two fields of touch, however, where 
the distribution is not so simple: the face and 
the buttocks. Neither in the face nor in the but- 
tocks is there one single mode of sense com- 
munication. 

The face is of course the great window of the 
self, the great opening of the self upon the world, 
the great gateway. The lower body has its own 



74 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

gates of exit. But the bulk of our communica- 
tion with all the outer universe goes on through 
the face. 

And every one of the windows or gates of the 
face has its direct communication with each 
of the four great centers of the first field of con- 
sciousness. Take the mouth, with the sense of 
taste. The mouth is primarily the gate of the 
two chief sensual centers. It is the gateway to 
the belly and the loins. Through the mouth we 
eat and we drink. In the mouth we have the 
sense of taste. At the lips, too, we kiss. And the 
kiss of the mouth is the first sensual connection. 

In the mouth also are the teeth. And the 
teeth are the instruments of our sensual will. 
The growth of the teeth is controlled entirely 
from the two great sensual centers below the 
diaphragm. But almost entirely from the one 
center, the voluntary center. The growth and 
the life of the teeth depend almost entirely on 
the lumbar ganglion. During the growth of 
the teeth the sympathetic mode is held in abey- 
ance. There is a sort of arrest. There is pain, 
there is diarrhoea, there is misery for the baby. 

And we, in our age, have no rest with our 
teeth. Our mouths are too small. For many 
ages we have been suppressing the avid, negroid, 



THE FIVE SENSES 75 

sensual will. We have been converting our- 
selves into ideal creatures, all spiritually con- 
scious, and active dynamically only on one plane, 
the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has con- 
tracted, our teeth have become soft and un- 
quickened. Where in us are the sharp and vivid 
teeth of the wolf, keen to defend and devour? 
If we had them more, we should be happier. 
Where are the white negroid teeth? Where? 
In our little pinched mouths they have no room. 
We are sympathy-rotten, and spirit-rotten, and 
idea-rotten. We have forfeited our flashing 
sensual power. And we have false teeth in our 
mouths. In the same way the lips of our sen- 
sual desire go thinner and more meaningless, in 
the compression of our upper will and our idea- 
driven impulse. Let us break the conscious, 
self-conscious love-ideal, and we shall grow 
strong, resistant teeth once more, and the teeth- 
ing of our young willnot be the hell it is. 

Teething is strictly the period when the vol- 
untary center of the lower plane first comes into 
full activity, and takes for a time the pre- 
cedence. 

So, the mouth is the great sensual gate to the 
lower body. But let us not forget it is also a 
gate by which we breathe, the gate through 



76 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

which we speak and go impalpably forth to our 
object, the gate at which we can kiss the pinched, 
delicate, spiritual kiss. Therefore, although the 
main sensual gate of entrance to the lower body, 
it has its reference also to the upper body. 

Taste, the sense of taste, is an intake of a pure 
communication between us and a body from the 
outside world. It contains the element of touch, 
and in this it refers to the cardiac plexus. But 
taste, qua taste, refers purely to the solar plexus. 

And then smell. The nostrils are the great 
gate from the wide atmosphere of heaven to the 
lungs. The extreme sigh of yearning we catch 
through the mouth. But the delicate nose ad- 
vances always into the air, our palpable com- 
municator with the infinite air. Thus it has its 
first delicate root in the cardiac plexus, the root 
of its intake. And the root of the delicate-proud 
exhalation, rejection, is in the thoracic ganglion. 
But the nostrils have their other function of 
smell. Here the delicate nerve-ends run direct 
from the lower centers, from the solar plexus 
and the lumbar ganglion, or even deeper. There 
is the refined sensual intake when a scent is 
sweet. There is the sensual repudiation when 
a scent is unsavoury. And just as the fullness 
of the lips and the shape of the mouth depend on 



THE FIVE SENSES 77 

the development from the lower or the upper 
centers, the sensual or the spiritual, so does the 
shape of the nose depend on the direct control 
of the deepest centers of consciousness. A per- 
fect nose is perhaps the result of a balance in the 
four modes. But what is a perfect nose! — We 
only know that a short snub nose goes with an 
over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; 
while a long nose derives from the center of the 
upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great cen- 
ter of curiosity, and benevolent or objective con- 
trol. A thick, squat nose is the sensual-sympa- 
thetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual 
voluntary nose, having the curve of repu- 
diation, as when we turn up our nose from 
a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughti- 
ness and subjective authority. The nose is one 
of the greatest indicators of character. That is 
to say, it almost inevitably indicates the mode of 
predominant dynamic consciousness in the indi- 
vidual, the predominant primary center from 
which he lives. — When savages rub noses in- 
stead of kissing, they are exchanging a more 
sensitive and a deeper sensual salute than our 
lip-touch. 

The eyes are the third great gateway of the 
psyche. Here the soul goes in and out of the 



78 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

body, as a bird flying forth and coming home. 
But the root of conscious vision is almost en- 
tirely in the breast. When I go forth from my 
own eyes, in delight to dwell upon the world 
which is beyond me, outside me, then I go forth 
from wide open windows, through which shows 
the full and living lambent darkness of my pres- 
ent inward self. I go forth, and I leave the 
lovely open darkness of my sensient self re- 
vealed; when I go forth in the wonder of vision 
to dwell upon the beloved, or upon the wonder 
of the world, I go from the center of the glad 
breast, through the eyes, and who will may look 
into the full soft darkness of me, rich with my 
undiscovered presence. But if I am displeased, 
then hard and cold my self stands in my eyes, 
and refuses any communication, any sympathy, 
but merely stares outwards. It is the motion of 
cold objectivity from the thoracic ganglion. Or, 
from the same center of will, cold but intense my 
eyes may watch with curiosity, as a cat watches 
a fly. It may be into my curiosity will creep an 
element of warm gladness in the wonder which 
I am beholding outside myself. Or it may be 
that my curiosity will be purely and simply the 
cold, almost cruel curiosity of the upper will, 
directed from the ganglion of the shoulders : such 



THE FIVE SENSES 79 

as is the acute attention of an experimental 
scientist. 

The eyes have, however, their sensual root as 
well. But this is hard to transfer into language, 
as all our vision, our modern Northern vision is 
in the upper mode of actual seeing. 

There is a sensual way of beholding. There 
is the dark, desirous look of a savage who appre- 
hends only that which has direct reference to 
himself, that which stirs a certain dark yearn- 
ing within his lower self. Then his eye is 
fathomless blackness. But there is the dark eye 
which glances with a certain fire, and has no 
depth. There is a keen quick vision which 
watches, which beholds, but which never yields 
to the object outside : as a cat watching its prey. 
The dark glancing look which knows the 
strangeness, the danger of its object, the need to 
overcome the object. The eye which is not wide 
open to study, to learn, but which powerfully, 
proudly or cautiously glances, and knows the 
terror or the pure desirability of strangeness in 
the object it beholds. The savage is all in all in 
himself. That which he sees outside he hardly 
notices, or, he sees as something odd, something 
automatically desirable, something lustfully de- 



80 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

sirable, or something dangerous. What we call 
vision, that he has not. 

We must compare the look in a horse's eye 
with the look in a cow's. The eye of the cow is 
soft, velvety, receptive. She stands and gazes 
with the strangest intent curiosity. She goes 
forth from herself in wonder. The root of her 
vision is in her yearning breast. The same one 
hears when she moos. The same massive weight 
of passion is in a bull's breast; the passion to go 
forth from himself. His strength is in his 
breast, his weapons are on his head. The wonder 
is always outside him. 

But the horse's eye is bright and glancing. 
His curiosity is cautious, full of terror, or else 
aggressive and frightening for the object. The 
root of his vision is in his belly, in the solar 
plexus. And he fights with his teeth, and his 
heels, the sensual weapons. 

Both these animals, however, are established 
in the sympathetic mode. The life mode in 
both is sensitively sympathetic, or preponder- 
antly sympathetic. Those animals which like 
cats, wolves, tigers, hawks, chiefly live from the 
great voluntary centers, these animals are, in our 
sense of the word, almost visionless. Sight in 
them is sharpened or narrowed down to a point: 



THE FIVE SENSES 81 

the object of prey. It is exclusive. They see 
no more than this. And thus they see unthink- 
ably far, unthinkably keenly. 

Most animals, however, smell what they see : 
vision is not very highly developed. They know 
better by the more direct contact of scent. 

And vision in us becomes faulty because we 
proceed too much in one mode. We see too 
much, we attend too much. The dark, glancing 
sightlessness of the intent savage, the narrowed 
vision of the cat, the single point of vision of the 
hawk — these we do not know any more. We 
live far too much from the sympathetic centers, 
without the balance from the voluntary mode. 
And we live far, far too much from the upper 
sympathetic center and voluntary center, in an 
endless objective curiosity. Sight is the least sen- 
sual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to 
see, see, see — everything, everything through the 
eye, in one mode of objective curiosity. There 
is nothing inside us, we stare endlessly at the 
outside. So our eyes begin to fail; to retaliate 
on us. We go short-sighted, almost in self- 
protection. 

Hearing the last, and perhaps the deepest of 
the senses. And here there is no choice. In 
every other faculty we have the power of rejec- 



82 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

tion. We have a choice of vision. We can, if 
we choose, see in the terms of the wonderful be- 
yond, the world of light into which we go forth 
in joy to lose ouselves in it. Or we can see, as 
the Egyptians saw, in the terms of their own 
dark souls : seeing the strangeness of the creature 
outside, the gulf between it and them, but finally, 
its existence in terms of themselves. They saw 
according to their own unchangeable idea, sub- 
jectively, they did not go forth from themselves 
to seek the wonder outside. 

Those are the two chief ways of sympathetic 
vision. We call our way the objective, the 
Egyptian the subjective. But objective and sub- 
jective are words that depend absolutely on your 
starting point. Spiritual and sensual are much 
more descriptive terms. 

But there are, of course, also the two ways of 
volitional vision. We can see with the endless 
modern critical sight, analytic, and at last de- 
liberately ugly. Or we can see as the hawk sees 
the one concentrated spot where beats the life- 
heart of our prey. 

In the four modes of sight we have some 
choice. We have some choice to refuse tastes 
or smells or touch. In hearing we have the 
minimum of choice. Sound acts direct upon the 



THE FIVE SENSES 83 

great affective centers. We may voluntarily 
quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we 
have really no choice of what we hear. Our 
will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost 
automatically, upon the affective centers. And 
we have no power of going forth from the ear. 
We are always and only recipient. 

Nevertheless, sound acts upon us in various 
ways, according to the four primary poles of 
consciousness. The singing of birds acts almost 
entirely upon the centers of the breast. Birds, 
which live by flight, impelled from the strong 
conscious-activity of the breast and shoulders, 
have become for us symbols of the spirit, the up- 
per mode of consciousness. Their legs have 
become idle, almost insentient twigs. Only the 
tail flirts from the center of the sensual will. 

But their singing acts direct upon the upper, 
or spiritual centers in us. So does almost all our 
music, which is all Christian in tendency. But 
modern music is analytical, critical, and it has 
discovered the power of ugliness. Like our 
martial music, it is of the upper plane, like our 
martial songs, our fifes and our brass-bands. 
These act direct upon the thoracic ganglion. 
Time was, however, when music acted upon the 
sensual centers direct. We hear it still in sav- 



84 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

age music, and in the roll of drums, and in the 
roaring of lions, and in the howling of cats. And 
in some voices still we hear the deeper resonance 
of the sensual mode of consciousness. But the 
tendency is for everything to be brought on to 
the upper plane, whilst the lower plane is just 
worked automatically from the upper. 



CHAPTER VI 

FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND 

WE can now see what is the true goal of edu- 
cation for a child. It is the full and har- 
monious development of the four primary modes 
of consciousness, always with regard to the indi- 
vidual nature of the child. 

The goal is not ideal. The aim is not mental 
consciousness. We want effectual human be- 
ings, not conscious ones. The final aim is not 
to know, but to be. There never was a more 
risky motto than that: Know thyself. YouVe 
got to know yourself as far as possible. But not 
just for the sake of knowing. YouVe got to 
know yourself so that you can at last be your- 
self. "Be yourself" is the last motto. 

The whole field of dynamic and effectual con- 
sciousness is always pre-mental, non-mental. 
Not even the most knowing man that ever lived 
would know how he would be feeling next week ; 
whether some new and utterly shattering im- 
pulse would have arisen in him and laid his 

85 



86 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

nicely-conceived self in ruins. It is the impulse 
we have to live by, not the ideals or the idea. 
But we have to know ourselves pretty thoroughly 
before we can break the automatism of ideals 
and conventions. The savage in a state of nature 
is one of the most conventional of creatures. So 
is a child. Only through fine delicate knowl- 
edge can we recognize and release our impulses. 
Now our whole aim has been to force each indi- 
vidual to a maximum of mental control, and 
mental consciousness. Our poor little plans of 
children are put into horrible forcing-beds, 
called schools, and the young idea is there forced 
to shoot. It shoots, poor thing, like a potato in 
a warm cellar. One mass of pallid sickly ideas 
and ideals. And no root, no life. The ideas 
shoot, hard enough, in our sad offspring, but 
they shoot at the expense of life itself. Never 
was such a mistake. Mental consciousness is a 
purely individual affair. Some men are born 
to be highly and delicately conscious. But for 
the vast majority, much mental consciousness is 
simply a catastrophe, a blight. It just stops their 
living. 

Our business, at the present, is to prevent at 
all cost the young idea from shooting. The ideal 
mind, the brain, has become the vampire of 



FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND 87 

modern life, sucking up the blood and the life. 
There is hardly an original thought or original 
utterance possible to us. All is sickly repetition 
of stale, stale ideas. 

Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only 
a few technical training establishments, nothing 
more. Let humanity lie fallow, for two genera- 
tions at least. Let no child learn to read, unless 
it learns by itself, out of its own individual per- 
sistent desire. 

That is my serious admonition, gentle reader. 
But I am not so flighty as to imagine you will 
pay any heed. But if I thought you would, I 
should feel my hope surge up. And if you don't 
pay any heed, calamity will at length shut your 
schools for you, sure enough. 

The process of transfer from the primary con- 
sciousness to recognized mental consciousness is 
a mystery like every other transfer. Yet it fol- 
lows its own laws. And here we begin to ap- 
proach the confines of orthodox psychology, 
upon which we have no desire to trespass. But 
this we can say. The degree of transfer from 
primary to mental consciousness varies with 
every individual. But in most individuals the 
natural degree is very low. 

The process of transfer from primary con- 



88 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

sciousness is called sublimation, the sublimating 
of the potential body of knowledge with the 
definite reality of the idea. And with this 
process we have identified all education. The 
very derivation of the Latin word education 
shows us. Of course it should mean the leading 
forth of each nature to its fullness. But with us, 
fools that we are, it is the leading forth of the 
primary consciousness, the potential or dynamic 
consciousness, into mental consciousness, which 
is finite and static. Now before we set out so 
gayly to lead our children en bloc out of the 
dynamic into the static way of consciousness, let 
us consider a moment what we are doing. 

A child in the womb can have no idea of the 
mother. I think orthodox psychology will allow 
us so much. And yet the child in the womb 
must be dynamically conscious of the mother. 
Otherwise how could it maintain a definite and 
progressively developing relation to her? 

This consciousness, however, is utterly non- 
ideal, non-mental, purely dynamic, a matter of 
dynamic polarized intercourse of vital vibra- 
tions, as an exchange of wireless messages which 
are never translated from the pulse-rhythm into 
speech, because they have no need to be. It is 
a dynamic polarized intercourse between the 



FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND 89 

great primary nuclei in the foetus and the cor- 
responding nuclei in the dynamic maternal 
psyche. 

This form of consciousness is established at 
conception, and continues long after birth. Nay, 
it continues all life long. But the particular in- 
terchange of dynamic consciousness between 
mother and child suffers no interruption at birth. 
It continues almost the same. The child has no 
conception whatsoever of the mother. It can- 
not see her, for its eye has no focus. It can hear 
her, because hearing needs no transmission into 
concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It 
knows her. But only by a form of vital dynamic 
correspondence, a sort of magnetic interchange. 
The idea does not intervene at all. 

Gradually, however, the dark shadow of our 
object begins to loom in the formless mind of 
the infant. The idea of the mother is, as it 
were, gradually photographed on the cerebral 
plasm. It begins with the faintest shadow — but 
the figure is gradually developed through years 
of experience. It is never quite completed. 

How does the figure of the mother gradually 
develop as a conception in the child mind? It 
develops as the result of the positive and nega- 
tive reaction from the primary centers of con- 



90 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

sciousness. From the first great center of sym- 
pathy the child is drawn to a lovely oneing with 
the mother. From the first great center of will 
comes the independent self-assertion which 
locates the mother as something outside, some- 
thing objective. And as a result of this twofold 
notion, a twofold increase in the child. First, 
the dynamic establishment of the individual 
consciousness in the infant: and then the first 
shadow of a mental conception of the mother, in 
the infant brain. The development of the origi- 
nal mind in every child and every man always 
and only follows from the dual fulfillment in the 
dynamic consciousness. 

But mark further. Each time, after the four- 
fold interchange between two dynamic polarized 
lives, there results a development in the individ- 
uality and a sublimation into consciousness, both 
simultaneously in each party: and this dual de- 
velopment causes at once a diminution in the 
dynamic polarity between the two parties. That 
is, as its individuality and its mental concept of 
the mother develop in the child, there is a cor- 
responding waning of the dynamic relation be- 
tween the child and the mother. And this is 
the natural progression of all love. As we have 
said before, the accomplishment of individuality 



FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND 91 

never finally exhausts the dynamic flow between 
parents and child. In the same way, a child can 
never have a finite conception of either of its 
parents. It can have a very much more finite, 
finished conception of its aunts or its friends. 
The portrait of the parent can never be quite 
completed in the mind of the son or daughter. 
As long as time lasts it must be left unfinished. 

Nevertheless, the inevitable photography of 
time upon the mental plasm does print at last 
a very substantial portrait of the parent, a very 
well-filled concept in the child mind. And the 
nearer a conception comes towards finality, the 
nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which 
this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To 
know, is to lose. When I have a finished mental 
concept of a beloved, or a friend, then the love 
and the friendship is dead. It falls to the level 
of an acquaintance. As soon as I have a fin- 
ished mental conception, a full idea even of my- 
self, then dynamically I am dead. To know is 
to die. 

But knowledge and death are part of our nat- 
ural development. Only, of course, most things 
can never be known by us in full. Which means 
we do never absolutely die, even to our parents. 
So that Jesus' question to His mother, "Woman, 



92 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

what have I to do with thee!" — while express- 
ing a major truth, still has an exaggerated sound, 
which comes from its denial of the minor truth. 

This progression from dynamic relationship 
towards a finished individuality and a finished 
mental concept is carried on from the four great 
primary centers through the correspondence 
medium of all the senses and sensibilities. First 
of all, the child knows the mother only through 
touch — perfect and immediate contact. And yet, 
from the moment of conception, the egg-cell re- 
pudiated complete adhesion and even communi- 
cation, and asserted its individual integrity. The 
child in the womb, perfect a contact though it 
may have with the mother, is all the time also 
dynamically polarized against this contact. 
From the first moment, this relation in touch 
has a dual polarity, and, no doubt, a dual mode. 
It is a fourfold interchange of consciousness, the 
moment the egg-cell has made its two spontane- 
ous divisions. 

As soon as the child is born, there is a real 
severance. The contact of touch is interrupted, 
it now becomes occasional only. True, the 
dynamic flow between mother and child is not 
severed when simple physical contact is missing. 
Though mother and child may not touch, still 



FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND 93 

the dynamic flow continues between them. The 
mother knows her child, feels her bowels and 
her breast drawn to it, even if it be a hundred 
miles away. But if the severance continue long, 
the dynamic flow begins to die, both in mother 
and child. It wanes fairly quickly — and per- 
haps can never be fully revived. The dynamic 
relation between parent and child may fairly 
easily fall into quiescence, a static condition. 

For a full dynamic relationship it is necessary 
that there be actual contact. The nerves run 
from the four primary dynamos, and end with 
live ends all over the body. And it is necessary 
to bring the live ends of the nerves of the child 
into contact with the live ends of corresponding 
nerves in the mother, so that a pure circuit is 
established. Wherever a pure circuit is estab- 
lished, there occurs a pure development in the 
individual creation, and this is inevitably accom- 
panied by sensation; and sensation is the first 
term of mental knowledge. 

So, from the field of the breast and arms, the 
upper circuit, and from the field of the knees 
and feet and belly, the lower circuit. 

And then, the moment a child is born, the face 
is alive. And the face communicates direct with 
both planes of primary consciousness. The 



94 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

moment a child is born, it begins to grope for 
the breast. And suddenly a new great circuit is 
established, the four poles all working at once, 
as the child sucks. There is the profound desir- 
ousness of the lower center of sympathy, and 
the superior avidity of the center of will, and 
at the same time, the cleaving yearning to the 
nipple, and the tiny curiosity of lips and gums. 
The nipple of the mother's breast is one of the 
great gates of the body, hence of the living 
psyche. In the nipple terminate vivid nerves 
which flash their very powerful vibrations 
through the mouth of the child and deep into 
its four great poles of being and knowing. Even 
the nipples of the man are gateways to the great 
dynamic flow : still gateways. 

Touch, taste, and smell are now active in the 
baby. And these senses, so-called, are strictly 
sensations. They are the first term of the child's 
mental knowledge. And on these three cerebral 
reactions the foundation of the future mind is 
laid. 

The moment there is a perfect polarized cir- 
cuit between the first four poles of dynamic con- 
sciousness, at that moment does the mind, the 
terminal station, flash into cognition. The first 
cognition is merely sensation : sensation and the 



FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND 9 5 

remembrance of sensation being the first ele- 
ment in all knowing and in all conception. 

The circuit of touch, taste, and smell must be 
well established, before the eyes begin actually 
to see. All mental knowledge is built up of sen- 
sation and of memory. It is the continually re- 
curring sensation of the touch of the mother 
which forms the basis of the first conception of 
the mother. After that, the gradually dis- 
criminated taste of the mother, and scent of the 
mother. Till gradually sight and hearing de- 
velop and largely usurp the first three senses, 
as medium of correspondence and of knowledge. 

And while, of course, the sensational knowl- 
edge is being secreted in the brain, in some much 
more mysterious way the living individuality of 
the child is being developed in the four first 
nuclei, the four great nerve-centers of the pri- 
mary field of consciousness and being. 

As time goes on, the child learns to see the 
mother. At first he sees her face as a blur, and 
though he knows her, knows her by a direct glow 
of communication, as if her face were a warm 
glowing life-lamp which rejoiced him. But 
gradually, as the circuit of touch, taste, and smell 
become powerfully established; gradually, as 
the individual develops in the child, and so re- 



96 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

treats towards isolation; gradually, as the child 
stands more immune from the mother, the cir- 
cuit of correspondence extends, and the eyes 
now communicate across space, the ears begin 
to discriminate sounds. Last of all develops dis- 
criminate hearing. 

Now gradually the picture of the mother is 
transferred to the child's mind, and the sound of 
the first baby-words is imprinted. And as the 
child learns to discriminate visually, objectively, 
between the mother and the nurse, he learns to 
choose, and becomes individually free. And 
still, the dynamic correspondence is not finished. 
It only changes its circuit. 

While the brain is registering sensations, the 
four dynamic centers are coming into perfect 
relation. Or rather, as we see, the reverse is 
the case. As the dynamic centers come into per- 
fect relation, the mind registers and remembers 
sensations, and begins consciously to know. 
But the great field of activity is still and always 
the dynamic field. When a child learns to 
walk, it learns almost entirely from the solar 
plexus and the lumbar ganglion, the cardiac 
plexus and the thoracic ganglion balancing the 
upper body. 

There is a perfected circuit of polarity. The 



FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND 97 

two lower centers are the positive, the two upper 
the negative poles. And so the child strikes out 
with his feet for the earth, presses, and strikes 
away again from the earth, the two upper cen- 
ters meanwhile corresponding implicitly in the 
balance of the upper body. It is a chain of 
spontaneous activity in the four primary cen- 
ters, establishing a circuit through the whole 
body. But the positive poles are the lower cen- 
ters. And the brain has probably nothing at 
all to do with it. Even the desire to walk is not 
born in the brain, but in the primary nuclei. 

The same with the use of the hands and arms. 
It means the establishment of a pure circuit be- 
tween the four centers, the two upper poles now 
being the positive, the lower the negative poles, 
and the hands the live end of the wire. Again 
the brain is not concerned. Probably, even in 
the first deliberate grasping of an object, the 
brain is not concerned. Not until there is an 
element of recognition and sensation-memory. 

All our primal activity originates and circu- 
lates purely in the four great nerve centers. All 
our active desire, our genuine impulse, our love, 
our hope, our yearning, everything originates 
mysteriously at these four great centers or well- 
heads of our existence: everything vital and 



98 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

dynamic. The mind can only register that 
which results from the emanation of the dynamic 
impulse and the collision or communion of this 
impulse with its object. 

So now we see that we can never know our- 
selves. Knowledge is to consciousness what the 
signpost is to the traveler: just an indication of 
the way which has been traveled before. 
Knowledge is not even in direct proportion to 
being. There may be great knowledge of chem- 
istry in a man who is a rather poor being: and 
those who know, even in wisdom like Solomon, 
are often at the end of the matter of living, not 
at the beginning. As a matter of fact, David 
did the living, the dynamic achievement. To 
Solomon was left the consummation and the 
finish, and the dying down. 

Yet we must know, if only in order to learn 
not to know. The supreme lesson of human con- 
sciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, 
how not to interfere. That is, how to live 
dynamically, from the great Source, and not 
statically, like machines driven by ideas and 
principles from the head, or automatically, 
from one fixed desire. At last, knowledge must 



FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND 99 

be put into its true place in the living activity 
of man. And we must know deeply, in order 
even to do that. 

So a new conception of the meaning of edu- 
cation. 

Education means leading out the individual 
nature in each man and woman to its true full- 
ness. You can't do that by stimulating the mind. 
To pump education into the mind is fatal. That 
which sublimates from the dynamic conscious- 
ness into the mental consciousness has alone any 
value. This, in most individuals, is very little 
indeed. So that most individuals, under a wise 
government, would be most carefully protected 
from all vicious attempts to inject extraneous 
ideas into them. Every extraneous idea, which 
has no inherent root in the dynamic conscious- 
ness, is as dangerous as a nail driven into a 
young tree. For the mass of people, knowledge 
must be symbolical, mythical, dynamic. This 
means, you must have a higher, responsible, con- 
scious class: and then in varying degrees the 
lower classes, varying in their degree of con- 
sciousness. Symbols must be true from top to 
bottom. But the interpretation of the symbols 
must rest, degree after degree, in the higher, re- 



ioo FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

sponsible, conscious classes. To those who can- 
not divest themselves again of mental conscious- 
ness and definite ideas, mentality and ideas are 
death, nails through their hands and feet. 



CHAPTER VII 

FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION 

THE first process of education is obviously 
not a mental process. When a mother 
talks to a baby, she is not encouraging its little 
mind to think. When she is coaxing her child 
to walk, she is not making a theoretic exposition 
of the science of equilibration. She crouches 
before the child, at a little distance, and spreads 
her hands. "Come, baby — come to mother. 
Come! Baby, walk! Yes, walk! Walk to 
mother! Come along. A little walk to its 
mother. Come! Come then! Why yes, a 
pretty baby! Oh, he can toddle! Yes — yes — 
No, don't be frightened, a dear. No — Come 
to mother — " and she catches his little pinafore 
by the tip — and the infant lurches forward. 
"There! There! A beautiful walk! A beauti- 
ful walker, yes! Walked all the way to mother, 
baby did. Yes, he did— " 

Now who will tell me that this talk has any 
rhyme or reason? Not a spark of reason. Yet 



102 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

a real rhyme : or rhythm, much more important. 
The song and the urge of the mother's voice 
plays direct on the affective centers of the child, 
a wonderful stimulus and tuition. The words 
hardly matter. True, this constant repetition 
in the end forms a mental association. At the 
moment they have no mental significance at all 
for the baby. But they ring with a strange pal- 
pitating music in his fluttering soul, and lift 
him into motion. 

And this is the way to educate children : the 
instinctive way of mothers. There should be 
no effort made to teach children to think, to 
have ideas. Only to lift them and urge them into 
dynamic activity. The voice of dynamic sound, 
not the words of understanding. Damn under- 
standing. Gestures, and touch, and expression 
of the face, not theory. Never have ideas about 
children — and never have ideas for them. 

If we are going to teach children we must 
teach them first to move. And not by rule or 
mental dictation. Horror! But by playing and 
teasing and anger, and amusement. A child 
must learn to move blithe and free and proud. 
It must learn the fullness of spontaneous mo- 
tion. And this it can only learn by continuous 
reaction from all the centers, through all the 



FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION 103 

emotions. A child must learn to contain itself. 
It must learn to sit still if need be. Part of the 
first phase of education is the learning to stay 
still and be physically self-contained. Then a 
child must learn to be alone, and to adventure 
alone, and to play alone. Any peevish clinging 
should be quite roughly rebuffed. From the 
very first day, throw a child back on its own 
resources — even a little cruelly sometimes. But 
don't neglect it, don't have a negative attitude 
to it. Play with it, tease it and roll it over as 
a dog her puppy, mock it when it is too timorous, 
laugh at it, scold it when it really bothers you — 
for a child must learn not to bother another per- 
son — and when it makes you genuinely angry, 
spank it soundly. But always remember that it 
is a single little soul by itself; and that the re- 
sponsibility for the wise, warm relationship is 
yours, the adult's. 

Then always watch its deportment. Above 
all things encourage a straight backbone and 
proud shoulders. Above all things despise a 
slovenly movement, an ugly bearing and un- 
pleasing manner. And make a mock of petu- 
lance and of too much timidity. 

We are imbeciles to start bothering about love 
and so forth in a child. Forget utterly that 



104 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

there is such a thing as emotional reciprocity. 
But never forget your own honor as an adult in- 
dividual towards a small individual. It is a 
question of honor, not of love. 

A tree grows straight when it has deep roots 
and is not too stifled. Love is a spontaneous 
thing, coming out of the spontaneous effectual 
soul. As a deliberate principle it is an unmiti- 
gated evil. Also morality which is based on 
ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. A 
child which is proud and free in its movements, 
in all its deportment, will be quite as moral as 
need be. Honor is an instinct, a superb instinct 
which should be kept keenly alive. Immorality, 
vice, crime, these come from a suppression or a 
collapse at one or other of the great primary 
centers. If one of these centers fails to main- 
tain its true polarity, then there is a physical or 
psychic derangement, or both. And viciousness 
or crime are the result of a derangement in the 
primary system. Pure morality is only an in- 
stinctive adjustment which the soul makes in 
every circumstance, adjusting one thing to an- 
other livingly, delicately, sensitively. There 
can be no law. Therefore, at every cost and 
charge keep the first four centers alive and 
alert, active, and vivid in reaction. And then 



FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION 105 

you need fear no perversion. What we have 
done, in our era, is, first, we have tried as far as 
possible to suppress or subordinate the two sen- 
sual centers. We have so unduly insisted on and 
exaggerated the upper spiritual or selfless mode 
— the living in the other person and through the 
other person— that we have caused already a 
dangerous over-balance in the natural psyche. 

To correct this we go one worse, and try to 
rule ourselves more and more by the old ideas 
of sympathy and benevolence. We think that 
love and benevolence will cure anything. 
Whereas love and benevolence are our poison, 
poison to the giver, and still more poison to the 
receiver. Poison only because there is practi- 
cally no spontaneous love left in the world. It 
is all will, the fatal love-will and insatiable 
morbid curiosity. The pure sympathetic mode 
of love long ago broke down. There is now 
only deadly, exaggerated volition. 

This is also why general education should be 
suppressed as soon as possible. We have fallen 
into a state of fixed, deadly will. Everything 
we do and say to our children in school tends 
simply to fix in them the same deadly will, un- 
der the pretence of pure love. Our idealism is 
the clue to our fixed will. Love, beauty, 



106 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

benevolence, progress, these are the words we 
use. But the principle we evoke is a principle 
of barren, sanctified compulsion of all life. We 
want to put all life under compulsion. "How 
to outwit the nerves," for example. — And 
therefore, to save the children as far as possible, 
elementary education should be stopped at 
once. 

No child should be sent to any sort of public 
institution before the age of ten years. If I 
could but advise, I would advise that this notice 
should be sent through the length and breadth 
of the land. 

"Parents, the State can no longer be re- 
sponsible for the mind and character of 
your children. From the first day of the 
coming year, all schools will be closed for 
an indefinite period. Fathers, see that your 
boys are trained to be men. Mothers, see 
that your daughters are trained to be 
women. 

"All schools will shortly be converted 
either into public workshops or into gym- 
nasia. No child will be admitted into the 
workshops under ten years of age. Active 
training in primitive modes of fighting and 



FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION 107 

gymnastics will be compulsory for all boys 
over ten years of age. 

"All girls over ten years of age must at- 
tend at one domestic workshop. All girls 
over ten years of age may, in addition, at- 
tend at one workshop of skilled labor, or 
of technical industry, or of art. Admission 
for three months' probation. 

"All boys over ten years of age must at- 
tend at one workshop of domestic crafts, 
and at one workshop of skilled labor, or of 
technical industry, or of art. A boy may 
choose, with his parents' consent, his school 
of labor, or technical industry or art, but 
the directors reserve the right to transfer 
him to a more suitable department, if neces- 
sary, after a three months' probation. 

"It is the intention of this State to form 
a body of active, energetic citizens. The) 
danger of a helpless, presumptuous, news- 
paper-reading population is universally 
recognizee!. 

"All elementary education is left in the 
hands of the parents, save such as is neces- 
sary to the different branches of industry. 

"Schools of mental culture are free to all 
individuals over fourteen years of age. 



108 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

"Universities are free to all who obtain 
the first culture degree." 

The fact is, our process of universal education 
is to-day so uncouth, so psychologically barbaric, 
that it is the most terrible menace to the exist- 
ence of our race. We seize hold of our children, 
and by parrot-compulsion we force into them a 
set of mental tricks. By unnatural and unhealthy 
compulsion we force them into a certain amount 
of cerebral activity. And then, after a few 
years, with a certain number of windmills in 
their heads, we turn them loose, like so many 
inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. 
All that they have learnt in their heads has no 
reference at all to their dynamic souls. The 
windmills spin and spin in a wind of words, 
Dulcinea del Toboso beckons round every 
corner, and our nation of inferior Quixotes 
jumps on and off tramcars, trains, bicycles, 
motor-cars, buses, in one mad chase of the 
divine Dulcinea, who is all the time chew- 
ing chocolates and feeling very, very bored. 
It is no use telling the poor devils to stop. 
They read in the newspapers about more 
Dulcineas and more chivalry due to them 
and more horrid persons who injure the fair 



FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION 109 

fame of these bored females. And round they 
skelter, after their own tails. That is, when 
they are not forced to grind out their lives for a 
wage. Though work is the only thing that pre- 
vents our masses from going quite mad. 

To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous 
germs mankind has ever been injected with. 
They are introduced into the brain by injection, 
in schools and by means of newspapers, and then 
we are done for. 

An idea which is merely introduced into the 
brain, and started spinning there like some out- 
rageous insect, is the cause of all our misery to- 
day. Instead of living from the spontaneous 
centers, we live from the head. We chew, chew, 
chew at some theory, some idea. We grind, 
grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we 
are beside ourselves. Our primary affective 
centers, our centers of spontaneous being, are 
so utterly ground round and automatized that 
they squeak in all stages of disharmony and in- 
cipient collapse. We are a people — and not we 
alone — of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and 
we don't even know we are raving. 

And all is due, directly and solely, to that 
hateful germ we call the Ideal. The Ideal is 
always evil, no matter what ideal it be. No idea 



no FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

should ever be raised to a governing throne. 

This does not mean that man should imme- 
diately cut off his head and try to develop a pair 
of eyes in his breasts. But it does mean this: 
that an idea is just the final concrete or regis- 
tered result of living dynamic interchange and 
reactions : that no idea is ever perfectly ex- 
pressed until its dynamic cause is finished; and 
that to continue to put into dynamic effect an 
already perfected idea means the nullification 
of all living activity, the substitution of mech- 
anism, and all the resultant horrors of ennui, ec- 
stasy, neurasthenia, and a collapsing psyche. 

The whole tree of our idea of life and living 
is dead. Then let us leave off hanging ourselves 
and our children from its branches like medlars. 

The idea, the actual idea, must rise ever fresh, 
ever displaced, like the leaves of a tree, from out 
of the quickness of the sap, and according to the 
forever incalculable effluence of the great 
dynamic centers of life. The tree of life is a 
gay kind of tree that is forever dropping its 
leaves and budding out afresh, quite different 
ones. If the last lot were thistle leaves, the next 
lot may be vine. You never can tell with the 
Tree of Life. 

So we come back to that precious child who 



FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION in 

costs us such a lot of ink. By what right, I ask 
you, are we going to inject into him our own 
disease-germs of ideas and infallible motives? 
By the right of the diseased, who want to infect 
everybody. 

There are few, few people in whom the living 
impulse and reaction develops and sublimates 
into mental consciousness. There are all kinds 
of trees in the forest. But few of them indeed 
bear the apples of knowledge. The modern 
world insists, however, that every individual 
shall bear the apples of knowledge. So we go 
through the forest of mankind, cut back every 
tree, and try to graft it into an apple-tree. A 
nice wood of monsters we make by so doing. 

It is not the nature of most men to know and 
to understand and to reason very far. Therefore, 
why should they make a pretense of it? It is 
the nature of some few men to reason, then let 
them reason. Those whose nature it is to be 
rational will instinctively ask why and where- 
fore, and wrestle with themselves for an answer. 
But why every Tom, Dick and Harry should 
have the why and wherefore of the universe 
rammed into him, and should be allowed to 
draw the conclusion hence that he is the ideal 
person and responsible for the universe, I don't 



ii2 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

know. It is a lie anyway — for neither the whys 
nor the wherefores are his own, and he is but a 
parrot with his nut of a universe. 

Why should we cram the mind of a child with 
facts that have nothing to do with his own expe- 
riences, and have no relation to his own dynamic 
activity? Let us realize that every extraneous 
idea effectually introduced into a man's mind is 
a direct obstruction of his dynamic activity. 
Every idea which is introduced from outside into 
a man's mind, and which does not correspond to 
his own dynamic nature, is a fatal stumbling- 
block for that man : is a cause of arrest for his 
true individual activity, and a derangement to 
his psychic being. 

For instance, if I teach a man the idea that 
all men are equal. Now this idea has no founda- 
tion in experience, but is logically deduced from 
certain ethical or philosophic principles. But 
there is a disease of idealism in the world, and 
we all are born with it. Particularly teachers 
are born with it. So they seize on the idea of 
equality, and proceed to instil it. With what 
result? Your man is no longer a man, living 
his own life from his own spontaneous centers. 
He is a theoretic imbecile trying to frustrate and 
dislocate all life. 



FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION 113 

It is the death of all life to force a pure idea 
into practice. Life must be lived from the deep, 
self-responsible spontaneous centers of every 
individual, in a vital, non-ideal circuit of 
dynamic relation between individuals. The 
passions or desires which are thought-born are 
deadly. Any particular mode of passion or desire 
which receives an exclusive ideal sanction at 
once becomes poisonous. 

If this is true for men, it is much more true for 
women. Teach a woman to act from an idea, 
and you destroy her womanhood for ever. Make 
a woman self-conscious, and her soul is barren as 
a sandbag. Why were we driven out of Para- 
dise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease 
of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because 
we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise 
enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not be- 
cause we sinned. But because we got our sex 
into our head. 

When Eve ate that particular apple, she be- 
came aware of her own womanhood, mentally. 
And mentally she began to experiment with it. 
She has been experimenting ever since. So has 
man. To the rage and horror of both of them. 

These sexual experiments are really anathema. 
But once a woman is sexually self-conscious, 



ii4 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

what is she to do? There it is, she is born with 
the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was 
her mother before her. She is bound to experi- 
ment and try one idea after another, in the long 
run always to her own misery. She is bound to 
have fixed one, and then another idea of herself, 
herself as woman. First she is the noble spouse 
of a not-quite-so-noble male : then a Mater Dolo- 
rosa : then a ministering Angel : then a competent 
social unit, a Member of Parliament or a Lady 
Doctor or a platform speaker: and all the while, 
as a side show, she is the Isolde of some Tristan, 
or the Guinevere of some Lancelot, or the Fata 
Morgana of all men — in her own idea. She 
can't stop having an idea of herself. She can't 
get herself out of her own head. And there she 
is, functioning away from her own head and her 
own consciousness of herself and her own auto- 
matic self-will, till the whole man and woman 
game has become just a hell, and men with any 
backbone would rather kill themselves than go 
on with it — or kill somebody else. 

Yet we are going to inculcate more and more 
self-consciousness, teach every little Mary to be 
more and more a nice little Mary out of her own 
head, and every little Joseph to theorize himself 
up to the scratch. 



FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION 115 

And the point lies here. There will have to 
come an end. Every race which has become 
self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has 
perished. And then it has all started afresh, in 
a different way, with another race. And man 
has never learnt any better. We are really far, 
far more life-stupid than the dead Greeks or the 
lost Etruscans. Our day is pretty short, and 
closing fast. We can pass, and another race can 
follow later. 

But there is another alternative. We still 
have in us the power to discriminate between 
our own idealism, our own self-conscious will, 
and that other reality, our own true spontaneous 
self. Certainly we are so overloaded and dis- 
eased with ideas that we can't get well in a min- 
ute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against 
the disease, once we recognize it. The disease 
of love, the disease of "spirit," the disease of 
niceness and benevolence and feeling good on 
our own behalf and good on somebody else's 
behalf. Pah, it is all a gangrene. We can 
retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain 
there alone, like lepers, till we are cured of this 
ghastly white disease of self-conscious idealism. 

And we really can make a move on our chil- 
dren's behalf. We really can refrain from 



n6 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

thrusting our children any more into those hot- 
beds of the self-conscious disease, schools. We 
really can prevent their eating much more of 
the tissues of leprosy, newspapers and books. For 
a time, there should be no compulsory teaching 
to read and write at all. The great mass of hu- 
manity should never learn to read and write — 
never. 

And instead of this gnawing, gnawing disease 
of mental consciousness and awful, unhealthy 
craving for stimulus and for action, we must 
substitute genuine action. The war was really 
not a bad beginning. But we went out under the 
banners of idealism, and now the men are home 
again, the virus is more active than ever, rotting 
their very souls. 

The mass of the people will never mentally 
understand. But they will soon instinctively 
fall into line. 

Let us substitute action, all kinds of action, 
for the mass of people, in place of mental activ- 
ity. Even twelve hours' work a day is better 
than a newspaper at four in the afternoon and a 
grievance for the rest of the evening. But par- 
ticularly let us take care of the children. At 
all cost, try to prevent a girl's mind from dwell- 
ing on herself, Make her act, work, play: 



FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION 117 

assume a rule over her girlhood. Let her learn 
the domestic arts in their perfection. Let us 
even artificially set her to spin and weave. Any- 
thing to keep her busy, to prevent her reading 
and becoming self-conscious. Let us awake as 
soon as possible to the repulsive machine qual- 
ity of machine-made things. They smell of 
death. And let us insist that the home is sacred, 
the hearth, and the very things of the home. 
Then keep the girls apart from any familiarity 
or being "pals" with the boys. The nice clean 
intimacy which we now so admire between the 
sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, 
no deep, magical sex-life is possible. 

The same with the boys. First and foremost 
establish a rule over them, a proud, harsh, manly 
rule. Make them know that at every moment 
they are in the shadow of a proud, strong, adult 
authority. Let them be soldiers, but as individ- 
uals not machine units. There are wars in the 
future, great wars, which not machines will 
finally decide, but the free, indomitable life 
spirit. No more wars under the banners of the 
ideal, and in the spirit of sacrifice. But wars 
in the strength of individual men. And then, 
pure individualistic training to fight, and prep- 
aration for a whole new way of life, a new so- 



u8 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

ciety. Put money into its place, and science and 
industry. The leaders must stand for life, and 
they must not ask the simple followers to point 
out the direction. When the leaders assume re- 
sponsibility they relieve the followers forever of 
the burden of finding a way. Relieved of this 
hateful incubus of responsibility for general 
affairs, the populace can again become free and 
happy and spontaneous, leaving matters to their 
superiors. No newspapers — the mass of the 
people never learning to read. The evolving 
once more of the great spontaneous gestures of 
life. 

We can't go on as we are. Poor, nerve- 
worn creatures, fretting our lives away and 
hating to die because we have never lived. The 
secret is, to commit into the hands of the sacred 
few the responsibility which now lies like tor- 
ture on the mass. Let the few, the leaders, be 
increasingly responsible for the whole. And let 
the mass be free: free, save for the choice of 
leaders. 

Leaders — this is what mankind is craving for. 

But men must be prepared to obey, body and 
soul, once they have chosen the leader. And let 
them choose the leader for life's sake only. 

Begin then — there is a beginning. 



CHAPTER VIII 

EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN 
AND CHILD 

THE one thing we have to avoid, then, even 
while we carry on our own old process of 
education, is this development of the powers of 
so-called self-expression in a child. Let us be- 
ware of artificially stimulating his self-con- 
sciousness and his so-called imagination. All 
that we do is to pervert the child into a ghastly 
state of self-consciousness, making him affect- 
edly try to show off as we wish him to show off. 
The moment the least little trace of self-con- 
sciousness enters in a child, good-by to every- 
thing except falsity. 

Much better just pound away at the ABC and 
simple arithmetic and so on. The modern meth- 
ods do make children sharp, give them a sort of 
slick finesse, but it is the beginning of the mis- 
chief. It ends in the great "unrest" of a nerv- 
ous, hysterical proletariat. Begin to teach a child 

of five to "understand." To understand the sun 

119 



120 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

and moon and daisy and the secrets of procrea- 
tion, bless your soul. Understanding all the 
way. — And when the child is twenty he'll have 
a hysterical understanding of his own invented 
grievance, and there's an end of him. Under- 
standing is the devil. 

A child mustn't understand things. He must 
have them his own way. His vision isn't ours. 
When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't see 
the correct biological object we intend him to 
see. He sees a big living presence of no particu- 
lar shape with hair dangling from its neck and 
four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he 
is quite right. Because he does not see with op- 
tical, photographic vision. The image on his 
retina is not the image of his consciousness. The 
image on his retina just does not go into him. 
His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, 
vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two- 
eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence loom- 
ing imminent. 

And to force the boy to see a correct one-eyed 
horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in 
front of his vision. It simply kills his inward 
seeing. We don't want him to see a proper 
horse. The child is not a little camera. He is a 
small vital organism which has direct dynamic 



EDUCATION 121 

rapport with the objects of the outer universe. 
He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, 
with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature 
of the creature. So that to this day a Noah's Ark 
tree is more real than a Corot tree or a Constable 
tree: and a flat Noah's Ark cow has a deeper 
vital reality than even a Cuyp cow. 

The mode of vision is not one and final. The 
mode of vision is manifold. And the optical 
image is a mere vibrating blur to a child — and, 
indeed, to a passionate adult. In this vibrating 
blur the soul sees its own true correspondent. It 
sees, in a cow, horns and squareness, and a long 
tail. It sees, for a horse, a mane, and a long 
face, round nose, and four legs. And in each 
case a darkly vital presence. Now horns and 
squareness and a long thin ox-tail, these are the 
fearful and wonderful elements of the cow- 
form, which the dynamic soul perfectly per- 
ceives. The ideal-image is just outside nature, 
for a child— something false. In a picture, a 
child wants elemental recognition, and not cor- 
rectness or expression, or least of all, what we 
call understanding. The child distorts inev- 
itably and dynamically. But the dynamic ab- 
straction is more than mental. If a huge eye 
sits in the middle of the cheek, in a child's draw- 



122 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

ing, this shows that the deep dynamic conscious- 
ness of the eye, its relative exaggeration, is the 
life-truth, even if it is a scientific falsehood. 

On the other hand, what on earth is the good 
of saying to a child, "The world is a flattened 
sphere, like an orange." It is simply pernicious. 
You had much better say the world is a poached 
egg in a frying pan. That might have some 
dynamic meaning. The only thing about the 
flattened orange is that the child just sees this 
orange disporting itself in blue air, and never 
bothers to associate it with the earth he treads 
on. And yet it would be so much better for the 
mass of mankind if they never heard of the flat- 
tened sphere. They should never be told that 
the earth is round. It only makes everything 
unreal to them. They are balked in their im- 
pression of the flat good earth, they can't get 
over this sphere business, they live in a fog of 
abstraction, and nothing is anything. Save for 
purposes of abstraction, the earth is a great plain, 
with hills and valleys. Why force abstractions 
and kill the reality, when there's no need? 

As for children, will we never realize that 
their abstractions are never based on observa- 
tions, but on subjective exaggerations? If there 
is an eye in the face, the face is all eye. It is the 



EDUCATION 123 

child soul which cannot get over the mystery of 
the eye. If there is a tree in a landscape, the 
landscape is all tree. Always this partial focus. 
The attempt to make a child focus for a whole 
view — which is really a generalization and an 
adult abstraction — is simply wicked. Yet the 
first thing we do is to set a child making relief- 
maps in clay, for example: of his own district. 
Imbecility! He has not even the faintest im- 
pression of the total hill on which his home 
stands. A steepness going up to a door — and 
front garden railings — and perhaps windows. 
That's the lot. 

The top and bottom of it is, that it is a crime 
to teach a child anything at all, school-wise. It 
is just evil to collect children together and teach 
them through the head. It causes absolute 
starvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile 
substitute of brain knowledge is all the gain. 
The children of the middle classes are so vitally 
impoverished, that the miracle is they continue 
to exist at all. The children of the lower classes 
do better, because they escape into the streets. 
But even the children of the proletariat are now 
infected. 

And, of course, as my critics point out, under 
all the school-smarm and newspaper-cant, man 



i2 4 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

is to-day as savage as a cannibal, and more dan- 
gerous. The living dynamic self is denatural- 
ized instead of being educated. 

We talk about education — leading forth the 
natural intelligence of a child. But ours is just 
the opposite of leading forth. It is a ramming 
in of brain facts through the head, and a conse- 
quent distortion, suffocation, and starvation of 
the primary centers of consciousness. A nice 
day of reckoning we've got in front of us. 

Let us lead forth, by all means. But let us not 
have mental knowledge before us as the goal of 
the leading. Much less let us make of it a vicious 
circle in which we lead the unhappy child-mind, 
like a cow in a ring at a fair. We don't want to 
educate children so that they may understand. 
Understanding is a fallacy and a vice in most 
people. I don't even want my child to know, 
much less to understand. I don't want my child 
to know that five fives are twenty-five, any more 
than I want my child to wear my hat or my 
boots. I don't want my child to know. If he 
wants five fives let him count them on his fingers. 
As for his little mind, give it a rest, and let his 
dynamic self be alert. He will ask "why" often 
enough. But he more often asks why the sun 
shines, or why men have mustaches, or why 



EDUCATION 125 

grass is green, than anything sensible. Most of 
a child's questions are, and should be, unanswer- 
able. They are not questions at all. They are 
exclamations of wonder, they are remarks half- 
sceptically addressed. When a child says, "Why 
is grass green?" he half implies. '"Is it really 
green, or is it just taking me in?" And we sol- 
emnly begin to prate about chlorophyll. Oh, 
imbeciles, idiots, inexcusable owls! 

The whole of a child's development goes on 
from the great dynamic centers, and is basically 
non-mental. To introduce mental activity is to 
arrest the dynamic activity, and stultify true 
dynamic development. By the age of twenty- 
one our young people are helpless, hopeless, self- 
less, floundering mental entities, with nothing in 
front of them, because they have been starved 
from the roots, systematically, for twenty-one 
years, and fed through the head. They have had 
all their mental excitements, sex and everything, 
all through the head, and when it comes to the 
actual thing, why, there's nothing in it. Blase. 
The affective centers have been exhausted from 
the head. 

Before the age of fourteen, children should 
be taught only to move, to act, to do. And they 
should be taught as little as possible even of this. 



i26 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

Adults simply cannot and do not know any more 
what the mode of childish intelligence is. Adults 
always interfere. They always force the adult 
mental mode. Therefore children must be pre- 
served from adult instructions. 

Make a child work — yes. Make it do little 
jobs. Keep a fine and delicate and fierce dis- 
cipline, so that the little jobs are performed as 
perfectly as is consistent with the child's nature. 
Make the child alert, proud, and becoming in 
its movements. Make it know very definitely 
that it shall not and must not trespass on other 
people's privacy or patience. Teach it songs, 
tell it tales. But never instruct it school-wise. 
And mostly, leave it alone, send it away to be 
with other children and to get in and out of mis- 
chief, and in and out of danger. Forget your 
child altogether as much as possible. 

All this is the active and strenuous business of 
parents, and must not be shelved off on to 
strangers. It is the business of parents mentally 
to forget but dynamically never to forsake their 
children. 

It is no use expecting parents to know why 
schools are closed, and why they, the parents, 
must be quite responsible for their own children 
during the first ten years. If it is quite useless to 



EDUCATION 127 

expect parents to understand a theory of rela- 
tivity, much less will they understand the devel- 
opment of the dynamic consciousness. But why 
should they understand? It is the business of 
very few to understand and for the mass, it is 
their business to believe and not to bother, but to 
be honorable and humanly to fulfill their human 
responsibilities. To give active obedience to 
their leaders, and to possess their own souls in 
natural pride. 

Some must understand why a child is not to be 
mentally educated. Some must have a faint ink- 
ling of the processes of consciousness during the 
first fourteen years. Some must know what a 
child beholds, when it looks at a horse, and what 
it means when it says, "Why is grass green?" 
The answer to this question, by the way, is "Be- 



cause it is." 



The interplay of the four dynamic centers fol- 
lows no one conceivable law. Mental activity 
continues according to a law of co-relation. But 
there is no logical or rational co-relation in the 
dynamic consciousness. It pulses on inconse- 
quential, and it would be impossible to deter- 
mine any sequence. Out of the very lack of 
sequence in dynamic consciousness does the indi- 
vidual himself develop. The dynamic abstrac- 



128 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

tion of a child's precepts follows no mental law, 
and even no law which can ever be mentally 
propounded. And this is why it is utterly per- 
nicious to set a child making a clay relief-map 
of its own district, or to ask a child to draw con- 
clusions from given observations. Dynamically, 
a child draws no conclusions. All things still 
remain dynamically possible. A conclusion 
drawn is a nail in the coffin of a child's develop- 
ing being. Let a child make a clay landscape, if 
it likes. But entirely according to its own fancy, 
and without conclusions drawn. Only, let the 
landscape be vividly made — always the disci- 
pline of the soul's full attention. "Oh, but where 
are the factory chimneys?" — or else — "Why 
have you left out the gas-works?" or "Do you 
call that sloppy thing a church?" The particu- 
lar focus should be vivid, and the record in some 
way true. The soul must give earnest attention, 
that is all. 

And so actively disciplined, the child develops 
for the first ten years. We need not be afraid 
of letting children see the passions and reactions 
of adult life. Only we must not strain the sym- 
pathies of a child, in any direction, particularly 
the direction of love and pity. Nor must we in- 
troduce the fallacy of right and wrong. Spon- 



EDUCATION 129 

taneous distaste should take the place of right 
and wrong. And least of all must there be a cry : 
"You see, dear, you don't understand. When 
you are older — " A child's sagacity is better 
than an adult understanding, anyhow. 

Of course it is ten times criminal to tell young 
children facts about sex, or to implicate them in 
adult relationships. A child has a strong evanes- 
cent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes 
impossible words on back walls. But this is not 
a fully conscious mental act. It is a kind of 
dream act — quite natural. The child's curious, 
shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the 
course / of nature. And does nobody any harm 
at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But 
if a child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs 
coupling, well and good. It should see these 
things. Only, without comment. Let nothing 
be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us pre- 
serve the decent privacies. But if a child oc- 
casionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all 
the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exag- 
gerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is 
also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in 
the mental consciousness of these shadowy 
dynamic realities. 

In the same way, to talk to a child about an 



130 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

adult is vile. Let adults keep their adult feel- 
ings and communications for people of their 
own age. But if a child sees its parents violently 
quarrel, all the better. There must be storms. 
And a child's dynamic understanding is far 
deeper and more penetrating than our sophis- 
ticated interpretation. But never make a child 
a party to adult affairs. Never drag the child 
in. Refuse its sympathy on such occasions. Al- 
ways treat it as if it had no business to hear, even 
if it is present and must hear. Truly, it has no 
business mentally to hear. And the dynamic 
soul will always weigh things up and dispose of 
them properly, if there be no interference of 
adult comment or adult desire for sympathy. It 
is despicable for any one parent to accept a 
child's sympathy against the other parent. And 
the one who received the sympathy is always 
more contemptible than the one who is hated. 

Of course so many children are born to-day 
unnaturally mentally awake and alive to adult 
affairs, that there is nothing left but to tell them 
everything, crudely: or else, much better, to say: 
"Ah, get out, you know too much, you make me 
sick." 

To return to the question of sex. A child is 
born sexed. A child is either male or female, in 



EDUCATION 131 

the whole of its psyche and physique is either 
male or female. Every single living cell is either 
male or female, and will remain either male or 
female as long as life lasts. And every single 
cell in every male child is male, and every cell 
in every female child is female. The talk about 
a third sex, or about the indeterminate sex, is 
just to pervert the issue. 

Biologically, it is true, the rudimentary 
formation of both sexes is found in every indi- 
vidual. That doesn't mean that every individual 
is a bit of both, or either, ad lib. After a suffi- 
cient period of idealism, men become hopelessly 
self-conscious. That is, the great affective cen- 
ters no longer act spontaneously, but always wait 
for control from the head. This always breeds 
a great fluster in the psyche, and the poor self- 
conscious individual cannot help posing and 
posturing. Our ideal has taught us to be gentle 
and wistful: rather girlish and yielding, and 
very yielding in our sympathies. In fact, many 
young men feel so very like what they imagine 
a girl must feel, that hence they draw the con- 
clusion that they must have a large share of 
female sex inside them. False conclusion. 

These girlish men have often, to-day, the finest 
maleness, once it is put to the test. How is it 



132 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

then that they feel, and look, so girlish? It is 
largely a question of the direction of the polar- 
ized flow. Our ideal has taught us to be so lov- 
ing and so submissive and so yielding in our sym- 
pathy, that the mode has become automatic in 
many men. Now in what we will call the "nat- 
ural" mode, man has his positivity in the voli- 
tional centers, and women in the sympathetic. 
Tn fulfilling the Christian love ideal, however, 
men have reversed this. Man has assumed 
the gentle, all-sympathetic role, and wom- 
an has become the energetic party, with the 
authority in her hands. The male is the sensi- 
tive, sympathetic nature, the woman the active, 
effective, authoritative. So that the male acts 
as the passive, or recipient pole of attraction, the 
female as the active, positive, exertive pole, in 
human relations. Which is a reversal of the old 
flow. The woman is now the initiator, man the 
responder. They seem to play each other's 
parts. But man is purely male, playing woman's 
part, and woman is purely female, however 
manly. The gulf between Heliogabalus, or the 
most womanly man on earth, and the most manly 
woman, is just the same as ever: just the same 
old gulf between the sexes. The man is male, 
the woman is female. Only they are playing one 



EDUCATION 133 

another's parts, as they must at certain periods. 
The dynamic polarity has swung around. 

If we look a little closer, we can define this 
positive and negative business better. As a mat- 
ter of fact, positive and negative, passive and 
active cuts both ways. If the man, as thinker 
and doer, is active, or positive, and the woman 
negative, then, on the other hand, as the initiator 
of emotion, of feeling, and of sympathetic un- 
derstanding the woman is positive, the man neg- 
ative. The man may be the initiator in action, 
but the woman is initiator in emotion. The man 
has the initiative as far as voluntary activity 
goes, and the woman the initiative as far as sym- 
pathetic activity goes. In love, it is the woman 
naturally who loves, the man who is loved. In 
love, woman is the positive, man the negative. 
It is woman who asks, in love, and man who an- 
swers. In life, the reverse is the case. In know- 
ing and in doing, man is positive and woman 
negative : man initiates, and woman lives up to it. 

Naturally this nicely arranged order of things 
may be reversed. Action and utterance, which 
are male, are polarized against feeling, emotion, 
which are female. And which is positive, which 
negative? Was man, the eternal protagonist, 
born of woman, from her womb of fathomless 



134 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

emotion? Or was woman, with her deep womb 
of emotion, born from the rib of active man, the 
first created? Man, the doer, the knower, the 
original in being, is he lord of life? Or is woman, 
the great Mother, who bore us from the womb 
of love, is she the supreme Goddess? 

This is the question of all time. And as long 
as man and woman endure, so will the answer be 
given, first one way, then the other. Man, as 
the utterer, usually claims that Eve was created 
out of his spare rib: from the field of the crea- 
tive, upper dynamic consciousness, that is. But 
woman, as soon as she gets a word in, points to 
the fact that man inevitably, poor darling, is the 
issue of his mother's womb. So the battle rages. 

But some men always agree with the woman. 
Some men always yield to woman the creative 
positivity. And in certain periods, such as the 
present, the majority of men concur in regard- 
ing woman as the source of life, the first term in 
creation: woman, the mother, the prime being. 

And then, the whole polarity shifts over. Man 
still remains the doer and thinker. But he is 
so only in the service of emotional and procrea- 
tive woman. His highest moment is now the 
emotional moment when he gives himself up to 
the woman, when he forms the perfect answer 



EDUCATION 135 

for her great emotional and procreative asking. 
All his thinking, all his activity in the world 
only contributes to this great moment, when he 
is fulfilled in the emotional passion of the wom- 
an, the birth of rebirth, as Whitman calls it. 
In his consummation in the emotional passion 
of a woman, man is reborn, which is quite true. 

And there is the point at which we all now 
stick. Life, thought, and activity, all are de- 
voted truly to the great end of Woman, wife 
and mother. 

Man has now entered on to his negative mode. 
Now, his consummation is in feeling, not in ac- 
tion. Now, his activity is all of the domestic 
order and all his thought goes to proving that 
nothing matters except that birth shall continue 
and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe 
like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. 
Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, the 
crucified, and the reborn of woman. 

This being so, the whole tendency of his nature 
changes. Instead of being assertive and rather 
insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. 
He begins to have as many feelings — nay, more 
than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic 
endurance. He worships pity and tenderness 
and weakness, even in himself. In short, he 



136 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

takes on very largely the original role of woman. 
Woman meanwhile becomes the fearless, in- 
wardly relentless, determined positive party. 
She grips the responsibility. The hand that 
rocks the cradle rules the world. Nay, she 
makes man discover that cradles should not be 
rocked, in order that her hands may be left free. 
She is now a queen of the earth, and inwardly a 
fearsome tyrant. She keeps pity and tenderness 
emblazoned on her banners. But God help the 
man whom she pities. Ultimately she tears him 
to bits. 

Therefore we see the reversal of the old poles. 
Man becomes the emotional party, woman the 
positive and active. Man begins to show strong 
signs of the peculiarly strong passive sex desire, 
the desire to be taken, which is considered char- 
acteristic of woman. Man begins to have all the 
feelings of woman — or all the feelings which he 
attributed to woman. He becomes more fem- 
inine than woman ever was, and worships his 
own femininity, calling it the highest. In short, 
he begins to exhibit all signs of sexual complex- 
ity. He begins to imagine he really is half 
female. And certainly woman seems very male. 
So the hermaphrodite fallacy revives again. 

But it is all a fallacy. Man, in the midst of 



EDUCATION 137 

all his effeminacy, is still male and nothing but 
male. And woman, though she harangue in 
Parliament or patrol the streets with a helmet 
on her head, is still completely female. They 
are only playing each other's roles, because the 
poles have swung into reversion. The compass 
is reversed. But that doesn't mean that the 
north pole has become the south pole, or that 
each is a bit of both. 

Of course a woman should stick to her own 
natural emotional positivity. But then man 
must stick to his own positivity of being, of ac- 
tion, disinterested, non-domestic, male action, 
which is not devoted to the increase of the 
female. Once man vacates his camp of sincere, 
passionate positivity in disinterested being, his 
supreme responsibility to fulfill his own pro- 
foundest impulses, with reference to none but 
God or his own soul, not taking woman into 
count at all, in this primary responsibility to his 
own deepest soul; once man vacates this strong 
citadel of his own genuine, not spurious, divin- 
ity; then in comes woman, picks up the scepter 
and begins to conduct a rag-time band. 

Man remains man, however he may put on 
wistfulness and tenderness like petticoats, and 
sensibilities like pearl ornaments. Your sen- 



138 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

sitive little big-eyed boy, so much more gentle 
and loving than his harder sister, is male for all 
that, believe me. Perhaps evilly male, so 
mothers may learn to their cost: and wives still 
more. 

Of course there should be a great balance 
between the sexes. Man, in the daytime, must 
follow his own soul's greatest impulse, and give 
himself to life-work and risk himself to death. 
It is not woman who claims the highest in man. 
It is a man's own religious soul that drives him 
on beyond woman, to his supreme activity. For 
his highest, man is responsible to God alone. He 
may not pause to remember that he has a life 
to lose, or a wife and children to leave. He 
must carry forward the banner of life, though 
seven worlds perish, with all the wives and 
mothers and children in them. Hence Jesus, 
"Woman, what have I to do with thee?" Every 
man that lives has to say it again to his wife or 
mother, once he has any work or mission in hand, 
that comes from his soul. 

But again, no man is a blooming marvel for 
twenty-four hours a day. Jesus or Napoleon or 
any other of them ought to have been man 
enough to be able to come home at tea-time and 
put his slippers on and sit under the spell of his 



EDUCATION 139 

wife. For there you are, the woman has her 
world, her positivity : the world of love, of emo- 
tion, of sympathy. And it behooves every man 
in his hour to take off his shoes and relax and 
give himself up to his woman and her world. 
Not to give up his purpose. But to give up 
himself for a time to her who is his mate. — And 
so it is one detests the clock-work Kant, and the 
petit-bourgeois Napoleon divorcing his Jose- 
phine for a Hapsburg — or even Jesus, with his 
" Woman, what have I to do with thee?" — He 
might have added "just now." — They were all 
failures. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE BIRTH OF SEX 

THE last chapter was a chapter of semi- 
digression. We now return to the straight 
course. Is the straightness none too evident? 
Ah well, it's a matter of relativity. A child is 
born with one sex only, and remains always 
single in his sex. There is no intermingling, 
only a great change of roles is possible. But 
man in the female role is still male. 

Sex — that is to say, maleness and femaleness — 
is present from the moment of birth, and in 
every act or deed of every child. But sex in the 
real sense of dynamic sexual relationship, this 
does not exist in a child, and cannot exist until 
puberty and after. True, children have a sort 
of sex consciousness. Little boys and little girls 
may even commit indecencies together. And 
still it is nothing vital. It is a sort of shadow 
activity, a sort of dream-activity. It has no very 
profound effect. 

But still, boys and girls should be kept apart 

140 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 141 

as much as possible, that they may have some 
sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies 
between them in nature, and for the great 
strangeness which each has to offer the other, 
finally. We are all wrong when we say there is 
no vital difference between the sexes. There is 
every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy 
is male, every cell is female in a woman, and 
must remain so. Women can never feel or know 
as men do. And in the reverse men can never 
feel and know, dynamically, as women do. Man, 
acting in the passive or feminine polarity, is 
still man, and he doesn't have one single un- 
manly feeling. And women, when they speak 
and write, utter not one single word that men 
have not taught them. Men learn their feelings 
from women, women learn their mental con- 
sciousness from men. And so it will ever be. 
Meanwhile, women live forever by feeling, 
and men live forever from an inherent sense of 
purpose. Feeling is an end in itself. This is 
unspeakable truth to a woman, and never true 
for one minute to a man. When man, in the 
Epicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes 
himself a martyr to it — like Maupassant or Os- 
car Wilde. Woman will never understand the 
depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper 



H2 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

spirit. And man will never understand the 
sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play 
at the other's game, but they will remain apart. 

The whole mode, the whole everything is 
really different in man and woman. Therefore 
we should keep boys and girls apart, that they 
are pure and virgin in themselves. On mixing 
with one another, in becoming familiar, in being 
"pals," they lose their own male and female in- 
tegrity. And they lose the treasure of the future, 
the vital sex polarity, the dynamic magic of life. 
For the magic and the dynamism rests on 
otherness. 

For actual sex is a vital polarity. And a po- 
larity which rouses into action, as we know, at 
puberty. 

And how? As we know, a child lives from 
the great field of dynamic consciousness estab- 
lished between the four poles of the dynamic 
psyche, two great poles of sympathy, two great 
poles of will. The solar plexus and the lumbar- 
ganglion, great nerve-centers below the dia- 
phragm, act as the dynamic origin of all con- 
sciousness in man, and are immediately polarized 
by the other two nerve-centers, the cardiac 
plexus and the thoracic ganglion above the dia- 
phragm. At these four poles the whole flow, 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 143 

both within the individual and from without 
him, of dynamic consciousness and dynamic 
creative relationship is centered. These four first 
poles constitute the first field of dynamic con- 
sciousness for the first twelve or fourteen years 
of the life of every child. 

And then a change takes place. It takes place 
slowly, gradually and inevitably, utterly beyond 
our provision or control. The living soul is un- 
folding itself in another great metamorphosis. 

What happens, in the biological psyche, is 
that deeper centers of consciousness and func- 
tion come awake. Deep in the lower body the 
great sympathetic center, the hypogastric plexus 
has been acting all the time in a kind of dream- 
automatism, balanced by its corresponding vol- 
untary center, the sacral ganglion. At the age 
of twelve these two centers begin slowly to 
rumble awake, with a deep reverberant force 
that changes the whole constitution of the life 
of the individual. 

And as these two centers, the sympathetic 
center of the deeper abdomen, and the voluntary 
center of the loins, gradually sparkle into wake- 
ful, conscious activity, their corresponding poles 
are roused in the upper body. In the region of 
the throat and neck, the so-called cervical plex- 



144 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

uses and the cervical ganglia dawn into activity. 

We have now another field of dawning 
dynamic consciousness, that will extend far be- 
yond the first. And now various things happen 
to us. First of all actual sex establishes its 
strange and troublesome presence within us. 
This is the massive wakening of the lower body. 
And then, in the upper body, the breasts of a 
woman begin to develop, her throat changes its 
form. And in the man, the voice breaks, the 
beard begins to grow round the lips and on to 
the throat. There are the obvious physiological 
changes resulting from the gradual bursting 
into free activity of the hypogastric plexus and 
the sacral ganglion, in the lower body, and of 
the cervical plexuses and ganglia of the neck, in 
the upper body. 

Why the growth of hair should start at the 
lower and upper sympathetic regions we cannot 
say. Perhaps for protection. Perhaps to pre- 
serve these powerful yet supersensitive nodes 
from the inclemency of changes in temperature, 
which might cause. a derangement. Perhaps for 
the sake of protective warning, as hair warns 
when it is touched. Perhaps for a screen against 
various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of 
other suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 145 

even the hair of the head acts as a sensitive vibra- 
tion-medium for conveying currents of physical 
and vitalistic activity to and from the brain. And 
perhaps from the centers of intense vital sur- 
charge hair springs as a sort of annunciation or 
declaration, like a crest of life-assertion. Per- 
haps all these things, and perhaps others. 

But with the bursting awake of the four new 
poles of dynamic consciousness and being, change 
takes place in everything, the features now be- 
gin to take individual form, the limbs develop 
out of the soft round matrix of child-form, the 
body resolves itself into distinctions. A strange 
creative change in being has taken place. The 
child before puberty is quite another thing from 
the child after puberty. Strange indeed is this 
new birth, this rising from the sea of childhood 
into a new being. It is a resurrection which 
we fear. 

And now, a new world, a new heaven and a 
new earth. Now new relationships are formed, 
the old ones retire from their prominence. Now 
mother and father inevitably give way before 
masters and mistresses, brothers and sisters yield 
to friends. This is the period of Schwarmerei, of 
young adoration and of real initial friendships. 



146 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

A child before puberty has playmates. After 
puberty he has friends and enemies. 

A whole new field of passional relationship. 
And the old bonds relaxing, the old love retreat- 
ing. The father and mother bonds now relax, 
though they never break. The family love 
wanes, though it never dies. 

It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger 
now enter the soul. 

And it is the first hour of true individuality, 
the first hour of genuine, responsible solitariness. 
A child knows the abyss of forlornness. But an 
adolescent alone knows the strange pain of grow- 
ing into his own isolation of individuality. 

All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is 
a cataclysm and a new world. It is our most 
serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be 
responsible for it. 

Now sex comes into active being. Until pu- 
berty, sex is submerged, nascent, incipient only. 
After puberty, it is a tremendous factor. 

What is sex, really? We can never say, satis- 
factorily. But we know so much : we know that 
it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, 
and a circuit of force always flowing. The psy- 
choanalyst is right so far. There can be no 
vivid relation between two adult individuals 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 147 

which does not consist in a dynamic polarized 
flow of vitalistic force or magnetism or elec- 
tricity, call it what you will, between these two 
people. Yet is this dynamic flow inevitably sex- 
ual in nature? 

This is the moot point for psychoanalysis. 
But let us look at sex, in its obvious manifesta- 
tion. The sexual relation between man and 
woman consummates in the act of coition. Now 
what is the act of coition? We know its func- 
tional purpose of procreation. But, after all our 
experience and all our poetry and novels we 
know that the procreative purpose of sex is, to 
the individual man and woman, just a side-show. 
To the individual, the act of coition is a great 
psychic experience, a vital experience of tre- 
mendous importance. On this vital individual 
experience the life and very being of the indi- 
vidual largely depends. 

But what is the experience? Untellable. 
Only, we know something. We know that in the 
act of coition the blood of the individual man, 
acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity 
— we know no word, so say "electricity," by anal- 
ogy — rises to a culmination, in a tremendous 
magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of 
the female. The whole of the living blood in 



1 48 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

the two individuals forms a field of intense, po- 
larized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles 
must be brought into contact. In the act of coi- 
tion, the two seas of blood in the two individuals, 
rocking and surging towards contact, as near as 
possible, clash into a oneness. A great flash of 
interchange occurs, like an electric spark when 
two currents meet or like lightning out of the 
densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning 
flash which passes through the blood of both in- 
dividuals, there is a thunder of sensation which 
rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of 
each — and then the tension passes. 

The two individuals are separate again. But 
are they as they were before? Is the air the 
same after a thunderstorm as before? No. The 
air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with new- 
ness. So is the blood of man and woman after 
successful coition. After a false coition, like 
prostitution, there is not newness but a certain 
disintegration. 

But after coition, the actual chemical consti- 
tution of the blood is so changed, that usually 
sleep intervenes, to allow the time for chemical, 
biological readjustment through the whole 
system. 

So, the blood is changed and renewed, re- 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 149 

freshed, almost recreated, like the atmosphere 
after thunder. Out of the newness of the living 
blood pass the new strange waves which beat 
upon the great dynamic centers of the nerves: 
primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and the 
sacral ganglion. From these centers rise new 
impulses, new vision, new being, rising like 
Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of 
blood. And so individual life goes on. 

Perhaps, then, we will allow ourselves to say 
what, in psychic individual reality, is the act of 
coition. It is the bringing together of the sur- 
charged electric blood of the male with the po- 
larized electric blood of the female, with the 
result of a tremendous flashing interchange, 
which alters the constitution of the blood, and 
the very quality of being, in both. 

And this, surely, is sex. But is this the whole 
of sex? That is the question. 

After coition, we say the blood is renewed. 
We say that from the new, finely sparkling blood 
new thrills pass into the great affective centers 
of the lower body, new thrills of feeling, of im- 
pulse, of energy. — And what about these new 
thrills? 

Now, a new story. The new thrills are passed 
on to the great upper centers of the dynamic 



150 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

body. The individual polarity now changes, 
within the individual system. The upper cen- 
ters, cardiac plexus and cervical plexuses, thor- 
acic ganglion and cervical ganglia now assume 
positivity. These, the upper polarized centers, 
have now the positive role to play, the solar and 
the hypogastric plexuses, the lumbar and the 
sacral ganglia, these have the submissive, nega- 
tive role for the time being. 

And what then? What now, that the upper 
centers are finely active in positivity? Now it 
is a different story. Now there is new vision in 
the eyes, new hearing in the ears, new voice in 
the throat and speech on the lips. Now the new 
song rises, the brain tingles to new thought, the 
heart craves for new activity. 

The heart craves for new activity. For new 
collective activity. That is, for a new polarized 
connection with other beings, other men. 

Is this new craving for polarized communion 
with others, this craving for a new unison, is it 
sexual, like the original craving for the woman? 
Not at all. The whole polarity is different. 
Now, the positive poles are the poles of the 
breast and shoulders and throat, the poles of 
activity and full consciousness. Men, being 
themselves made new after the act of coition, 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 151 

wish to make the world new. A new, passionate 
polarity springs up between men who are bent 
on the same activity, the polarity between man 
and woman sinks to passivity. It is now day- 
time, and time to forget sex, time to be busy 
making a new world. 

Is this new polarity, this new circuit of pas- 
sion between comrades and co-workers, is this 
also sexual? It is a vivid circuit of polarized 
passion. Is it hence sex? 

It is not. Because what are the poles of pos- 
itive connection? — the upper, busy poles. What 
is the dynamic contact? — a unison'in spirit, in 
understanding, and a pure commingling in one 
great work, A mingling of the individual pas- 
sion into one great purpose. Now this is also a 
grand consummation for men, this mingling of 
many with one great impassioned purpose. But 
is this sex? Knowing what sex is, can we call 
this other also sex? We cannot. 

This meeting of many in one great passionate 
purpose is not sex, and should never be confused 
with sex. It is a great motion in the opposite 
direction. And I am sure that the ultimate, 
greatest desire in men is this desire for great pur- 
posive activity. When man loses his deep sense 
of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and 



i52 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

is lost. When he makes the sexual consumma- 
tion the supreme consummation, even in his se- 
cret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. 
When he makes woman, or the woman and child 
the great center of life and of life-significance, 
he falls into the beginnings of despair. 

Man must bravely stand by his own soul, his 
own responsibility as the creative vanguard of 
life. And he must also have the courage to go 
home to his woman and become a perfect answer 
to her deep sexual call. But he must never con- 
fuse his two issues. Primarily and supremely 
man is always the pioneer of life, adventuring 
onward into the unknown, alone with his own 
temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him ex- 
ists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when 
day has departed. Evening and the night are 
hers. 

The psychonanalysts, driving us back to the 
sexual consummation always, do us infinite 
damage. 

We have to break away, back to the great 
unison of manhood in some passionate purpose. 
Now this is not like sex. Sex is always individ- 
ual. A man has his own sex : nobody else's. And 
sexually he goes as a single individual; he can 
mingle only singly. So that to make sex a 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 153 

general affair is just a perversion and a lie. You 
can't get people and talk to them about their 
sex, as if it were a common interest. 

We have got to get back to the great purpose 
of manhood, a passionate unison in actively mak- 
ing a world. This is a real commingling of 
many. And in such a commingling we forfeit 
the individual. In the commingling of sex we 
are alone with one partner. It is an individual 
affair, there is no superior or inferior. But in 
the commingling of a passionate purpose, each 
individual sacredly abandons his individual. In 
the living faith of his soul, he surrenders his 
individuality to the great urge which is upon 
him. He may have to surrender his name, his 
fame, his fortune, his life, everything. But 
once a man, in the integrity of his own individ- 
ual soul, believes, he surrenders his own individ- 
uality to his belief, and becomes one of a united 
body. He knows what he does. He makes the 
surrender honorably, in agreement with his own 
soul's deepest desire. But he surrenders, and 
remains responsible for the purity of his sur- 
render. 

But what if he believes that his sexual consum- 
mation is his supreme consummation? Then he 
serves the great purpose to which he pledges 



154 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

himself only as long as it pleases him. After 
which he turns it down, and goes back to sex. 
With sex as the one accepted prime motive, the 
world drifts into despair and anarchy. 

Of all countries, America has most to fear 
from anarchy, even from one single moment's 
lapse into anarchy. The old nations are organ- 
ically fixed into classes, but America not. You 
can shake Europe to atoms. And yet peasants 
fall back to peasantry, artisans to industrial la- 
bor, upper classes to their control — inevitably. 
But can you say the same of America? 

America must not lapse for one single mo- 
ment into anarchy. It would be the end of her. 
She must drift no nearer to anarchy. She is 
near enough. 

Well, then, Americans must make a choice. 
It is a choice between belief in man's creative, 
spontaneous soul, and man's automatic power of 
production and reproduction. It is a choice be- 
tween serving man, or woman. It is a choice 
between yielding the soul to a leader, leaders, or 
yielding only to the woman, wife, mistress, or 
mother. 

The great collective passion of belief which 
brings men together, comrades and co-workers, 
passionately obeying their soul-chosen leader or 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 155 

leaders, this is not a sex passion. Not in any 
sense. Sex holds any two people together, but 
it tends to disintegrate society, unless it is sub- 
ordinated to the great dominating male passion 
of collective purpose. 

But when the sex passion submits to the great 
purposive passion, then you have fulness. And 
no great purposive passion can endure long un- 
less it is established upon the fulfillment in the 
vast majority of individuals of the true sexual 
passion. No great motive or ideal or social prin- 
ciple can endure for any length of time unless 
based upon the sexual fulfillment of the vast ma- 
jority of individuals concerned. 

It cuts both ways. Assert sex as the pre- 
dominant fulfillment, and you get the collapse 
of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. 
Assert purposiveness as the one supreme and 
pure activity of life, and you drift into barren 
sterility, like our business life of to-day, and 
our political life. You become sterile, you make 
anarchy inevitable. And so there you are. You 
have got to base your great purposive activity 
upon the intense sexual fulfillment of all your 
individuals. That was how Egypt endured. But 
you have got to keep your sexual fulfillment even 
then subordinate, just subordinate to the great 



156 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

passion of purpose: subordinate by a hair's 
breadth only: but still, by that hair's breadth, 
subordinate. 

Perhaps we can see now a little better — to go 
back to the child — where Freud is wrong in at- 
tributing a sexual motive to all human activity. 
It is obvious there is no real sexual motive in a 
child, for example. The great sexual centers are 
not even awake. True, even in a child of three, 
rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the 
wall, in its approach from the distance. But 
these are only an uneasy intrusion from the as- 
yet-uncreated, unready biological centers. The 
great sexual centers of the hypogastric plexus, 
and the immensely powerful sacral ganglion are 
slowly prepared, developed in a kind of pre- 
natal gestation during childhood before puberty. 
But even an unborn child kicks in the womb. So 
do the great sex-centers give occasional blind 
kicks in a child. It is part of the phenomenon 
of childhood. But we must be most careful not 
to charge these rather unpleasant apparitions or 
phenomena against the individual boy or girl. 
We must be very careful not to drag the matter 
into mental consciousness. Shoo it away. Rep- 
rimand it with a pah! and a faugh! and a bit of 
contempt. But do not get into any heat or any 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 157 

fear. Do not startle a passional attention. 
Drive the whole thing away like the shadow it is, 
and be very careful not to drive it into the con- 
sciousness. Be very careful to plant no seed of 
burning shame or horror. Throw over it merely 
the cold water of contemptuous indifference, dis- 
missal. 

After puberty, a child may as well be told the 
simple and necessary facts of sex. As things 
stand, the parent may as well do it. But briefly, 
coldly, and with as cold a dimissal as possible. — 
"Look here, you're not a child any more; you 
know it, don't you? You're going to be a man. 
And you know what that means. It means you're 
going to marry a woman later on, and get 
children. You know it, and I know it. But 
in the meantime, leave yourself alone. I know 
you'll have a lot of bother with yourself, and 
your feelings. I know what is happening to 
you. And I know you get excited about it. 
But you needn't. Other men have all gone 
through it. So don't you go creeping off by 
yourself and doing things on the sly. It won't 
do you any good. — I know what you'll do, be- 
cause we've all been through it. I know the 
thing will keep coming on you at night. But 
remember that I know. Remember. And re- 



158 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

member that I want you to leave yourself alone. 
I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through 
it all myself. You've got to go through these 
years, before you find a woman you want to 
marry, and whom you can marry. I went 
through them myself, and got myself worked 
up a good deal more than was good for me. — 
Try to contain yourself. Always try to contain 
yourself, and be a man. That's the only thing. 
Always try and be manly, and quiet in yourself. 
Remember I know what it is. I've been the 
same, in the same state that you are in. And 
probably I've behaved more foolishly and per- 
niciously than ever you will. So come to me if 
anything really bothers you. And don't feel sly 
and secret. I do know just what you've got and 
what you haven't. I've been as bad and per- 
haps worse than you. And the only thing I 
want of you is to be manly. Try and be manly, 
and quiet in yourself." 

That is about as much as a father can say to 
a boy, at puberty. You have to be very careful 
what you do : especially if you are a parent. To 
translate sex into mental ideas is vile, to make a 
scientific fact of it is death. 

As a matter of fact there should be some sort 
of initiation into true adult consciousness. Boys 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 159 

should be taken away from their mothers and 
sisters as much as possible at adolescence. They 
should be given into some real manly charge. 
And there should be some actual initiation into 
sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make 
the boy die again, symbolically, and pull him 
forth through some narrow aperture, to be born 
again, and make him suffer and endure terrible 
hardships, to make a great dynamic effect on the 
consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense of change 
in the very being. In short, a long, violent in- 
itiation, from which the lad emerges emaciated, 
but cut off forever from childhood, entered into 
the serious, responsible pale of manhood. And 
with his whole consciousness convulsed by a 
great change, as his dynamic psyche actually is 
convulsed. — And something in the same way, 
to initiate girls into womanhood. 

There should be the intense dynamic reac- 
tion: the physical suffering and the physical 
realization sinking deep into the soul, changing 
the soul for ever. Sex should come upon us as 
a terrible thing of suffering and privilege and 
mystery: a mysterious metamorphosis come upon 
us, and a new terrible power given us, and a 
new responsibility. Telling? — What's the good 
of telling? — The mystery, the terror, and 



160 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

the tremendous power of sex should never be 
explained away. The mass of mankind should 
never be acquainted with the scientific biologi- 
cal facts of sex: never. The mystery must re- 
main in its dark secrecy, and its dark, powerful 
dynamism. The reality of sex lies in the great 
dynamic convulsions in the soul. And as such 
it should be realized, a great creative-convulsive 
seizure upon the soul. — To make it a matter of 
test-tube mixtures, chemical demonstrations and 
trashy lock-and-key symbols is just blasting. 
Even more sickening is the line : "You see, dear, 
one day you'll love a man as I love Daddy, more 
than anything else in the whole world. And 
then, dear, I hope you'll marry him. Because 
if you do you'll be happy, and I want you to be 
happy, my love. And so I hope you'll marry 
the man you really love (kisses the child). 
— And then, darling, there will come a lot of 
things you know nothing about now. You'll want 
to have a dear little baby, won't you, darling? 
Your own dear little baby. And your husband's 
as well. Because it'll be his, too. You know 
that, don't you, dear? It will be born from both 
of you. And you don't know how, do you? Well, 
it will come from right inside you, dear, out of 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 161 

your own inside. You came out of mother's in- 
side, etc., etc." 

But I suppose there's really nothing else to be 
done, given the world and society as we've got 
them now. The mother is doing her best. 

But it is all wrong. It is wrong to make sex 
appear as if it were part of the dear-darling- 
love smarm: the spiritual love. It is even worse 
to take the scientific test-tube line. It all kills 
the great effective dynamism of life, and substi- 
tutes the mere ash of mental ideas and tricks. 

The scientific fact of sex is no more sex than 
a skeleton is a man. Yet you'd think twice be- 
fore you stock a skeleton in front of a lad and 
said, "You see, my boy, this is what you are when 
you come to know yourself." — And the ideal, 
lovey-dovey "explanation" of sex as something 
wonderful and extra lovey-dovey, a bill-and-coo 
process of obtaining a sweet little baby — or else 
"God made us so that we must do this, to bring 
another dear little baby to life" — well, it just 
makes one sick. It is disastrous to the deep 
sexual life. But perhaps that is what we want. 

When humanity comes to its senses it will 
realize what a fearful Sodom apple our under- 
standing is. What terrible mouths and stomachs 
full of bitter ash we've all got. And then we 



162 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

shall take away "knowledge" and "understand- 
ing," and lock them up along with the rest of 
poisons, to be administered in small doses only 
by competent people. 

We have almost poisoned the mass of 
humanity to death with understanding. The 
period of actual death and race-extermination is 
not far off. We could have produced the same 
barrenness and frenzy of nothingness in people, 
perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man 
is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. 
Our "understanding," our science and idealism 
have produced in people the same strange 
frenzy of self-repulsion as if they saw their own 
skulls each time they looked in the mirror. A 
man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and 
biological process, draped in an ideal, is he? 
No wonder he sees the skeleton grinning through 
the flesh. 

Our leaders have not loved men: they have 
loved ideas, and have been willing to sacrifice 
passionate men on the altars of the blood-drink- 
ing, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wil- 
son, or Karl Marx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt 
one hot blood-pulse of love for the working 
man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? 
Never. Each of these leaders has wanted to 



THE BIRTH OF SEX 163 

abstract him away from his own blood and be- 
ing, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of 
a man. 

And me? There is no danger of the working 
man ever reading my books, so I shan't hurt him 
that way. But oh, I would like to save him 
alive, in his living, spontaneous, original being. 
I can't help it. It is my passionate instinct. 

I would like him to give me back the respon- 
sibility for general affairs, a responsibility which 
he can't acquit, and which saps his life. I would 
like him to give me back the responsibility for 
the future. I would like him to give me back 
the responsibility for thought, for direction. I 
wish we could take hope and belief together. I 
would undertake my share of the responsibility, 
if he gave me his belief. 

I would like him to give me back books and 
newspapers and theories. And I would like to 
give him back, in return, his old insouciance, 
and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of 
life. 



CHAPTER X 

PARENT LOVE 

IN the serious hour of puberty, the individual 
passes into his second phase of accomplish- 
ment. But there cannot be a perfect transition 
unless all the activity is in full play in all the 
first four poles of the psyche. Childhood is a 
chrysalis from which each must extricate him- 
self. And the struggling youth or maid cannot 
emerge unless by the energy of all powers; he 
can never emerge if the whole mass of the world 
and the tradition of love hold him back. 

Now we come to the greater peril of our par- 
ticular form of idealism. It is the idealism of 
love and of the spirit: the idealism of yearning, 
outgoing love, of pure sympathetic communion 
and "understanding." And this idealism recog- 
nizes as the highest earthly love, the love of 
mother and child. 

And what does this mean? It means, for every 

delicately brought up child, indeed for all the 

children who matter, a steady and persistent 

164 



PARENT LOVE 165 

pressure upon the upper sympathetic centers, 
and a steady and persistent starving of the lower 
centers, particularly the great voluntary center 
of the lower body. The center of sensual, manly 
independence, of exultation in the sturdy, defiant 
self, willfulness and masterfulness and pride, 
this center is steadily suppressed. The warm, 
swift, sensual self is steadily and persistently 
denied, damped, weakened, throughout all the 
period of childhood. And by sensual we do not 
mean greedy or ugly, we mean the deeper, more 
impulsive reckless nature. Life must be always 
refined and superior. Love and happiness must 
be the watchword. The willful, critical element 
of the spiritual mode is never absent, the silent, 
if forbearing disapproval and distaste is always 
ready. Vile bullying forbearance. 

With what result? The center of upper sym- 
pathy is abnormally, inflamedly excited; and 
the centers of will are so deranged that they 
operate in jerks and spasms. The true polarity 
of the sympathetic-voluntary system within the 
child is so disturbed as to be almost deranged. 
Then we have an exaggerated sensitiveness alter- 
nating with a sort of helpless fury: and we have 
delicate frail children with nerves or with 
strange whims. And we have the strange cold 



1 66 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

obstinacy of the spiritual will, cold as hell, fixed 
in a child. 

Then one parent, usually the mother, is the 
object of blind devotion, whilst the other par- 
ent, usually the father, is an object of resistance. 
The child is taught, however, that both parents 
should be loved, and only loved : and that love, 
gentleness, pity, charity, and all "higher" emo- 
tions, these alone are genuine feelings, all the 
rest are false, to be rejected. 

With what result? The upper centers are 
developed to a degree of unnatural acuteness 
and reaction — or again they fall numbed and 
barren. And then between parents and children 
a painfully false relation grows up: a relation 
as of two adults, either of two pure lovers, or 
of two love-appearing people who are really try- 
ing to bully one another. Instead of leaving the 
child with its own limited but deep and incom- 
prehensible feelings, the parent, hopelessly in- 
volved in the sympathetic mode of selfless love, 
and spiritual love-will, stimulates the child into 
a consciousness which does not belong to it, on 
the one plane, and robs it of its own spontaneous 
consciousness and freedom on the other plane. 

And this is the fatality. Long before puberty, 
by an exaggeration and an intensity of spiritual 



PARENT LOVE 167 

love from the parents, the second centers of 
sympathy are artificially aroused into response. 
And there is an irreparable disaster. Instead of 
seeing as a child should see, through a glass, 
darkly, the child now opens premature eyes of 
sympathetic cognition. Instead of knowing in 
part, as it should know, it begins, at a fearfully 
small age, to know in full. The cervical plexuses 
and the cervical ganglia, which should only be- 
gin to awake after adolescence, these centers of 
the higher dynamic sympathy and cognition, are 
both artificially stimulated, by the adult per- 
sonal love-emotion and love-will into response, 
in a quite young child, sometimes even in an 
infant. This is a holy obscenity. 

Our particular mode of idealism causes us to 
suppress as far as possible the sensual centers, to 
make them negative. The whole of the activity 
is concentrated, as far as possible, in the upper 
or spiritual centers, the centers of the breast and 
throat, which we will call the centers of dynamic 
cognition, in contrast to the centers of sensual 
comprehension below the diaphragm. 

And then a child arrives at puberty, with its 
upper nature already roused into precocious 
action. The child nowadays is almost invariably 
precocious in "understanding." In the north, 



1 68 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

spiritually precocious, so that by the time it ar- 
rives at adolescence it already has experienced 
the extended sympathetic reactions which should 
have lain utterly dark. And it has experienced 
these extended reactions with whom? With the 
parent or parents. 

Which is man devouring his own offspring. 
For to the parents belongs, once and for all, the 
dynamic reaction on the first plane of conscious- 
ness only, the reaction and relationship at the first 
four poles of dynamic consciousness. When the 
second, the farther plane of consciousness rouses 
into action, the relationship is with strangers. 
All human instinct and all ethnology will prove 
this to us. What sex-instinct there is in a child 
is always adverse to the parents. 

But also, the parents are all too quick. They 
all proceed to swallow their children before the 
children can get out of their clutches. And even, 
if parents do send away their children at the 
age of puberty — to school or elsewhere — it is 
not much good. The mischief has been done be- 
fore. For the first twelve years the parents and 
the whole community forcibly insist on the 
child's living from the upper centers only, and 
particularly the upper sympathetic centers, 
without the balance of the warm, deep sensual 



PARENT LOVE 169 

self. Parents and community alike insist on 
rousing an adult sympathetic response, and a 
mental answer in the child-schools, Sunday- 
schools, books, home-influence — all works in 
this one pernicious way. But it is the home, 
the parents, that work most effectively and in- 
tensely. There is the most intimate mesh of love, 
love-bullying, and "understanding" in which a 
child is entangled. 

So that a child arrives at the age of puberty 
already stripped of its childhood's darkness, 
bound, and delivered over. Instead of waking 
now to a whole new field of consciousness, a 
whole vast and wonderful new dynamic impulse 
towards new connections, it finds itself fatally 
bound. Puberty accomplishes itself. The hour 
of sex strikes. But there is your child, bound, 
helpless. You have already aroused in it the 
dynamic response to your own insatiable love- 
will. You have already established between 
your child and yourself the dynamic relation in 
the further plane of consciousness. You have 
got your child as sure as if you had woven its 
flesh again with your own. You have done what 
it is vicious for any parent to do : you have estab- 
lished between your child and yourself the bond 
of adult love : the love of man for man, woman 



i7d FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

for woman, or man for woman. All your ten- 
derness, your cherishing will not excuse you. It 
only deepens your guilt. You have established 
between your child and yourself the bond of fur- 
ther sympathy. I do not speak of sex. I speak 
of pure sympathy, sacred love. The parents 
establish between themselves and their child the 
bond of the higher love, the further spiritual 
love, the sympathy of the adult soul. 

And this is fatal. It is a sort of incest. It is 
a dynamic spiritual incest, more dangerous than 
sensual incest, because it is more intangible and 
less instinctively repugnant. But let psycho- 
analysis fall into what discredit it may, it has 
done us this great service of proving to us that 
the intense upper sympathy, indeed the dynamic 
relation either of love-will or love-sympathy, 
between parent and child, upon the upper plane, 
inevitably involves us in a conclusion of incest. 

For although it is our aim to establish a purely 
spiritual dynamic relation on the upper plane 
only, yet, because of the inevitable polarity of 
the human psychic system, we shall arouse at the 
same time a dynamic sensual activity on the 
lower plane, the deeper sensual plane. We may 
be as pure as angels, and yet, being human, this 
will and must inevitably happen. When Mrs. 



PARENT LOVE 171 

Ruskin said that John Ruskin should have mar- 
ried his mother she spoke the truth. He was 
married to his mother. For in spite of all our 
intention, all our creed, all our purity, all our 
desire and all our will, once we arouse the 
dynamic relation in the upper, higher plane of 
love, we inevitably evoke a dynamic conscious- 
ness on the lower, deeper plane of sensual love. 
And then what? 

Of course, parents can reply that their love, 
however intense, is pure, and has absolutely no 
sensual element. Maybe — and maybe not. But 
admit that it is so. It does not help. The in- 
tense excitement of the upper centers of sym- 
pathy willy-nilly arouses the lower centers. It 
arouses them to activity, even if it denies them 
any expression or any polarized connection. 
Our psyche is so framed that activity aroused on 
one plane provokes activity on the correspond- 
ing plane, automatically. So the intense pure 
love-relation between parent and child inevit- 
ably arouses the lower centers in the child, the 
centers of sex. Now the deeper sensual centers, 
once aroused, should find response from the sen- 
sual body of some other, some friend or lover. 
The response is impossible between parent and 
child. Myself, I believe that biologically there 



172 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

is radical sex-aversion between parent and child, 
at the deeper sensual centers. The sensual cir- 
cuit cannot adjust itself spontaneously between 
the two. 

So what have you? Child and parent in- 
tensely linked in adult love-sympathy and love- 
will, on the upper plane, and in the child, the 
deeper sensual centers aroused, but finding no 
correspondent, no objective, no polarized con- 
nection with another person. There they are, 
the powerful centers of sex, acting spasmodi- 
cally, without balance. They must be polarized 
somehow. So they are polarized to the active 
upper centers within the child, and you get an 
introvert. 

This is how introversion begins. The lower 
sexual centers are aroused. They find no sym- 
pathy, no connection, no response from outside, 
no expression. They are dynamically polarized 
by the upper centers within the individual. 
That is, the whole of the sexual or deeper sen- 
sual flow goes on upwards in the individual, to 
his own upper, from his own lower centers, The 
upper centers hold the lower in positive polarity. 
The flow goes on upwards. There must be some 
reaction. And so you get, first and foremost, self- 
consciousness, an intense consciousness in the 



PARENT LOVE 173 

upper self of the lower self. This is the first 
disaster. Then you get the upper body exploit- 
ing the lower body. You get the hands exploit- 
ing the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and 
in masturbation. You get a pornographic long- 
ing with regard to the self. You get the 
obscene post cards which most youths possess. 
You get the absolute lust for dirty stories, which 
so many men have. And you get various mild 
sex perversions, such as masturbation, and so on. 

What does all this mean? It means that the 
activity of the lower psyche and lower body is 
polarized by the upper body. Eyes and ears 
want to gather sexual activity and knowl- 
edge. The mind becomes full of sex: and 
always, in an introvert, of his own sex. If we 
examine the apparent extroverts, like the flaunt- 
ing Italian, we shall see the same thing. It is 
his own sex which obsesses him. 

And to-day what have we but this? Almost 
inevitably we find in a child now an intense, 
precocious, secret sexual preoccupation. The 
upper self is rabidly engaged in exploiting the 
lower self. A child and its own roused, inflamed 
sex, its own shame and masturbation, its own 
cruel, secret sexual excitement and sex curiosity, 
this is the greatest tragedy of our day. The child 



174 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

does not so much want to act as to know. The 
thought of actual sex connection is usually re- 
pulsive. There is an aversion from the normal 
coition act. But the craving to feel, to see, to 
taste, to know, mentally in the head, this is in- 
satiable. Anything, so that the sensation and 
experience shall come through the upper chan- 
nels. This is the secret of our introversion and 
our perversion to-day. Anything rather than 
spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. 
Anything rather than the merely normal passion. 
Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental ele- 
ment you can into sex, but make it an affair of 
the upper consciousness, the mind and eyes and 
mouth and fingers. This is our vice, our dirt, 
our disease. 

And the adult, and the ideal are to blame. 
But the tragedy of our children, in their in- 
flamed, solitary sexual excitement, distresses us 
beyond any blame. 

It is time to drop the word love, and more than 
time to drop the ideal of love. Every frenzied 
individual is told to find fulfillment in love. So 
he tries. Whereas, there is no fulfillment in 
love. Half of our fulfillment comes through 
love, through strong, sensual love. But the cen- 
tral fulfillment, for a man, is that he possess his 



PARENT LOVE 175 

own soul in strength within him, deep and alone. 
The deep, rich aloneness, reached and perfected 
through love. And the passing beyond any fur- 
ther quest of love. 

This central fullness of self-possession is our 
goal, if goal there be any. But there are two 
great ways of fulfillment. The first, the way of 
fulfillment through complete love, complete, 
passionate, deep love. And the second, the 
greater, the fulfillment through the accomplish- 
ment of religious purpose, the soul's earnest 
purpose. We work the love way falsely, from 
the upper self, and work it to death. The sec- 
ond way, of active unison in strong purpose, and 
in faith, this we only sneer at. 

But to return to the child and the parent. The 
coming to the fulfillment of single aloneness, 
through love, is made impossible for us by the 
ideal, the monomania of more love. At the very 
age danger euse, when a woman should be accom- 
plishing her own fulfillment into maturity and 
rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a new 
lover. At the very crucial time when she should 
be coming to a state of pure equilibrium and 
rest with her husband, she turns rabidly against 
rest or peace or equilibrium or husband in any 
shape or form, and demands more love, more 



176 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

love, a new sort of lover, one who will "under- 
stand" her. And as often as not she turns to 
her son. 

It is true, a woman reaches her goal of fulfill- 
ment through feeling. But through being "un- 
derstood" she reaches nowhere, unless the lover 
understands what a vice it is for a woman to get 
herself and her sex into her head. A woman 
reaches her fulfillment through love, deep sen- 
sual love, and exquisite sensitive communion. 
But once she reaches the point of fulfillment, 
she should not break off to ask for more excite- 
ments. She should take the beauty of maturity 
and peace and quiet faithfulness upon her. 

This she won't do, however, unless the man, 
her husband, goes on beyond her. When a man 
approaches the beginning of maturity and the 
fulfillment of his individual self, about the age 
of thirty-five, then is not his time to come to 
rest. On the contrary. Deeply fulfilled through 
marriage, and at one with his own soul, he must 
now undertake the responsibility for the next 
step into the future. He must now give himself 
perfectly to some further purpose, some pas- 
sionate purposive activity. Till a man makes 
the great resolution of aloneness and singleness 
of being, till he takes upon himself the silence 



PARENT LOVE 177 

and central appeasedness of maturity; and then, 
after this, assumes a sacred responsibility for the 
next purposive step into the future, there is no 
rest. The great resolution of aloneness and 
appeasedness, and the further deep assumption 
of responsibility in purpose — this is necessary to 
every parent, every father, every husband, at a 
certain point. If the resolution is never made, 
the responsibility never embraced, then the love- 
craving will run on into frenzy, and lay waste 
to the family. In the woman particularly the 
love-craving will run on to frenzy and disaster. 
Seeking, seeking the fulfillment in the deep 
passional self; diseased with self-consciousness 
and sex in the head, foiled by the very loving 
weakness of the husband who has not the courage 
to withdraw into his own stillness and single- 
ness, and put the wife under the spell of his ful- 
filled decision ; the unhappy woman beats about 
for her insatiable satisfaction, seeking whom she 
may devour. And usually, she turns to her 
child. Here she provokes what she wants. 
Here, in her own son who belongs to her, she 
seems to find the last perfect response for which 
she is craving. He is a medium to her, she pro- 
vokes from him her own answer. So she throws 
herself into a last great love for her son, a final 



178 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

and fatal devotion, that which would have been 
the richness and strength of her husband and is 
poison to her boy. The husband, irresolute, 
never accepting his own higher responsibility, 
bows and accepts. And the fatal round of intro- 
version and "complex" starts once more. If man 
will never accept his own ultimate being, his 
final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, 
then he must expect woman to dash from disaster 
to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled. 

"On revient toujours a son premier amour." 
It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really 
meant: "On ne revient jamais a son premier 
amour" But as a matter of fact, a man never 
leaves his first love, once the love is established. 
He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a 
man establishes a full dynamic communication 
at the deeper and the higher centers, with a 
woman, this can never be broken. But sex in 
the head breaks down, and half circuits break 
down. Once the full circuit is established, how- 
ever, this can never break down. 

Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, 
with sex in the head. We find a woman who is 
the same. We marry because we are "pals." 
The sex is a rather nasty fiasco. We keep up a 
pretense of "pals" — and nice love. Sex spins 



PARENT LOVE 179 

wilder in the head than ever. There is either a 
family of children whom the dissatisfied parents 
can devote themselves to, thereby perverting the 
miserable little creatures: or else there is a 
divorce. And at the great dynamic centers 
nothing has happened at all. Blank nothing. 
There has been no vital interchange at all in the 
whole of this beautiful marriage affair. 

Establish between yourself and another indi- 
vidual a dynamic connection at only two of the 
four further poles, and you will have the devil of 
a job to break the connection. Especially if it be 
the first connection you have made. Especially if 
the other individual be the first in the field. 

This is the case of the parents. Parents are first 
in the field of the child's further consciousness. 
They are criminal trespassers in that field. But 
that makes no matter. They are first in the field. 
They establish a dynamic connection between 
the two upper centers, the centers of the throat, 
the centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and 
cognition. They establish this circuit. And 
break it if you can. Very often not even death 
can break it. 

And as we see, the establishment of the upper 
love-and-cognition circuit inevitably provokes 
the lower sex-sensual centers into action, even 



180 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

though there be no correspondence on the sen- 
sual plane between the two individuals con- 
cerned. Then see what happens. If you want 
to see the real desirable wife-spirit, look at a 
mother with her boy of eighteen. How she 
serves him, how she stimulates him, how her true 
female self is his, is wife-submissive to him as 
never, never it could be to a husband. This is 
the quiescent, flowering love of a mature woman. 
It is the very flower of a woman's love : sexually 
asking nothing, asking nothing of the beloved, 
save that he shall be himself, and that for his 
living he shall accept the gift of her love. This 
is the perfect flower of married love, which a 
husband should put in his cap as he goes forward 
into the future in his supreme activity. For the 
husband, it is a great pledge, and a blossom. For 
the son also it seems wonderful. The woman 
now feels for the first time as a true wife might 
feel. And her feeling is towards her son. 

Or, instead of mother and son, read father and 
daughter. 

And then what? The son gets on swimmingly 
for a time, till he is faced with the actual fact 
of sex necessity. He gleefully inherits his ado- 
lescence and the world at large, without an ob- 
stacle in his way, mother-supported, mother- 



PARENT LOVE 181 

loved. Everything comes to him in glamour, he 
feels he sees wondrous much, understands a 
whole heaven, mother-stimulated. Think of the 
power which a mature woman thus infuses into 
her boy. He flares up like a flame in oxygen. 
No wonder they say geniuses mostly have great 
mothers. They mostly have sad fates. 

And then? — and then, with this glamorous 
youth? What is he actually to do with his sen- 
sual, sexual self? Bury it? Or make an effort 
with a stranger? For he is taught, even by his 
mother, that his manhood must not forego sex. 
Yet he is linked up in ideal love already, the best 
he will ever know. 

( No woman will give to a stranger that which 
she gives to her son, her father or her brother: 
that beautiful and glamorous submission which 
is truly the wife-submission.\ To a stranger, a 
husband, a woman insists on-being queen, god- 
dess, mistress, the positive, the adored, the first 
and foremost and the one and only. This she 
will not ask from her near blood-kin. Of her 
blood-kin, there is always one she will love de- 
votedly. 

And so, the charming young girl who adores 
her father, or one of her brothers, is sought in 
marriage by the attractive young man who loves 



1 82 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

his mother devotedly. And a pretty business the 
marriage is. We can't think of it. Of course 
they may be good pals. It's the only thing left. 
And there we are. The game is spoilt before 
it is begun. Within the circle of the family, 
owing to our creed of insatiable love, intense 
adult sympathies are provoked in quite young 
children. In Italy, the Italian stimulates adult 
sex-consciousness and sex-sympathy in his child, 
almost deliberately. But with us, it is usually 
spiritual sympathy and spiritual criticism. The 
adult experiences are provoked, the adult devo- 
tional sympathies are linked up, prematurely, as 
far as the child is concerned. We have the heart- 
wringing spectacle of intense parent-child love, a 
love intense as the love of man and woman, but 
not sexual; or else the great brother-sister devo- 
tion. And thus, the great love-experience which 
should lie in the future is forestalled. Within 
the family, the love-bond forms quickly, without 
the shocks and ruptures inevitable between 
strangers. And so, it is easiest, intensest — and 
seems the best. It seems the highest. You will 
not easily get a man to believe that his carnal 
love for the woman he has made his wife is as 
high a love as that he felt for his mother or 
sister. 



PARENT LOVE 183 

The cream is licked off from life before the 
boy or the girl is twenty. Afterwards — repeti- 
tion, disillusion, and barrenness. 

And the cause? — always the same. That par- 
ents will not make the great resolution to come 
to rest within themselves, to possess their own 
souls in quiet and fullness. The man has not the 
courage to withdraw at last into his own soul's 
stillness and aloneness, and then, passionately 
and faithfully, to strive for the living future. 
The woman has not the courage to give up her 
hopeless insistence on love and her endless de- 
mand for love, demand of being loved. She has 
not the greatness of soul to relinquish her own 
self-assertion, and believe in the man who be- 
lieves in himself and in his own soul's efforts : — 
if there are any such men nowadays, which is 
very doubtful. 

Alas, alas, the future! Your son, who has 
tasted the real beauty of wife-response in his 
mother or sister. Your daughter, who adores 
her brother, and who marries some woman's son. 
They are so charming to look at, such a lovely 
couple. And at first it is all such a good game, 
such good sport. Then each one begins to fret 
for the beauty of the lost, non-sexual, partial 
relationship. The sexual part of marriage has 



184 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

proved so — so empty. While that other love- 
liest thing — the poignant touch of devotion felt 
for mother or father or brother — why, this is 
missing altogether. The best is missing. The 
rest isn't worth much. Ah well, such is life. 
Settle down to it, and bring up the children care- 
fully to more of the same. — The future! — 
You've had all your good days by the time you're 
twenty. 

And, I ask you, what good will psychoanalysis 
do you in this state of affairs? Introduce an 
extra sex-motive to excite you for a bit and 
make you feel how thrillingly immoral things 
really are. And then — it all goes flat again. 
Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams : 
pah, when we've had the little excitement out 
of them we shall forget them as we have forgot- 
ten so many other catch-words. And we shall 
be just where we were before: unless we are 
worse, with more sex in the head, and more in- 
troversion, only more brazen. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 

HERE is a very vicious circle. And how to 
get out of it? In the first place, we have 
to break the love-ideal, once and for all. Love, 
as we see, is not the only dynamic. Taking love 
in its greatest sense, and making it embrace every 
form of sympathy, every flow from the great 
sympathetic centers of the human body, still it 
is not the whole of the dynamic flow, it is only 
the one-half. There is always the other volun- 
tary flow to reckon with, the intense motion of 
independence and singleness of self, the pride of 
isolation, and the profound fulfillment through 
power. 

The very first thing of all to be recognized is 
the danger of idealism. It is the one besetting 
sin of the human race. It means the fall into au- 
tomatism, mechanism, and nullity. 

We know that life issues spontaneously at the 
great nodes of the psyche, the great nerve-cen- 
ters. At first these are four only: then, after 

185 



1 86 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

puberty, they become eight: later there may 
still be an extension of the dynamic conscious- 
ness, a further polarization. But eight is enough 
at the moment. 

First at four, and then at eight dynamic cen- 
ters of the human body, the human nervous sys- 
tem, life starts spontaneously into being. The 
soul bursts day by day into fresh impulses, fresh 
desire, fresh purpose, at these our polar centers. 
And from these dynamic generative centers issue 
the vital currents which put us into connection 
with our object. We have really no will and no 
choice, in the first place. It is our soul which 
acts within us, day by day unfolding us according 
to our own nature. 

From the objective circuits and from the sub- 
jective circuits which establish and fulfill them- 
selves at the first four centers of consciousness 
we derive our first being, our child-being, and 
also our first mind, our child-mind. By the ob- 
jective circuits we mean those circuits which are 
established between the self and some extern.al 
object: mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or 
even tree or plant, or even further still, some 
particular place, some particular inanimate ob- 
ject, a knife or a chair or a cap or a doll or a 
wooden horse. For we must insist that every 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 187 

object which really enters effectively into our 
lives does so by direct connection. If I love my 
mother, it is because there is established between 
me and her a direct, powerful circuit of vital 
magnetism, call it what you will, but a direct 
flow of dynamic vital interchange and inter- 
course. I will not call this vital flow a force, 
because it depends on the incomprehensible ini- 
tiative and control of the individual soul or self. 
Force is that which is directed only from some 
universal will or law. Life is always individual, 
and therefore never controlled by one law, one 
God. And therefore, since the living really sway 
the universe, even if unknowingly; therefore 
there is no one universal law, even for the phys- 
ical forces. Because we insist that even the sun 
depends, for its heart-beat, its respiration, its 
pivotal motion, on the beating hearts of men and 
beast, on the dynamic of the soul-impulse in indi- 
vidual creatures. It is from the aggregate heart- 
beat of living individuals, of we know not how 
many or what sort of worlds, that the sun rests 
stable. 

Which may be dismissed as metaphysics, al- 
though it is quite as valid or even as demon- 
strable as Newton's Law of Gravitation, which 



1 88 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

law still remains a law, even if not quite so abso- 
lute as heretofore. 

But this is a digression. The argument is, that 
between an individual and any external object 
with which he has an affective connection, there 
exists a definite vital flow, as definite and con- 
crete as the electric current whose polarized cir- 
cuit sets our tram-cars running and our lamps 
shining, or our Marconi wires vibrating. 
Whether this object be human, or animal, or 
plant, or quite inanimate, there is still a circuit. 
My dog, my canary has a polarized connection 
with me. Nay, the very cells in the ash-tree I 
loved as a child had a dynamic vibratory con- 
nection with the nuclei in my own centers of 
primary consciousness. And further still, the 
boots I have worn are so saturated with my own 
magnetism, my own vital activity, that if any- 
one else wear them I feel it is a trespass, almost 
as if another man used my hand to knock away 
a fly. I doubt very much if a blood-hound, when 
it takes a scent, smells, in our sense of the word. 
It receives at the infinitely sensitive telegraphic 
center of the dog's nostrils the vital vibration 
which remains in the inanimate object from the 
individual with whom the object was associated. 
I should like to know if a dog would trace a pair 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 189 

of quite new shoes which had merely been 
dragged at the end of a string. That is, does he 
follow the smell of the leather itself, or the vibra- 
tion track of the individual whose vitality is 
communicated to the leather? 

So, there is a definite vibratory rapport be- 
tween a man and his surroundings, once he defi- 
nitely gets into contact with these surroundings. 
Any particular locality, any house which has 
been lived in has a vibration, a transferred vital- 
ity of its own. This is either sympathetic or anti- 
pathetic to the succeeding individual in varying 
degree. But certain it is that the inhabitants 
who live at the foot of Etna will always have a 
certain pitch of life-vibration, antagonistic to 
the pitch of vibration even of a Palermitan, in 
some measure. And old houses are saturated 
with human presence, at last to a degree of inde- 
cency, unbearable. And tradition, in its most 
elemental sense, means the continuing of the 
same peculiar pitch of vital vibration. 

Such is the objective dynamic flow between 
the psychic poles of the individual and the sub- 
stance of the external object, animate or inan- 
imate. The subjective dynamic flow is estab- 
lished between the four primary poles within 
the individual. Every dynamic connection be- 



igo FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

gins from one or the other of the sympathetic 
centers: is, or should be, almost immediately 
polarized from the corresponding voluntary 
center. Then a complete flow is set up, in one 
plane. But this always rouses the activity on 
the other, corresponding plane, more or less in- 
tense. There is a whole field of consciousness 
established, with positive polarity of the first 
plane, negative polarity of the second. Which 
being so, a whole fourfold field of dynamic 
consciousness now working within the individ- 
ual, direct cognition takes place. The mind be- 
gins to know, and to strive to know. 

The business of the mind is first and foremost 
the pure joy of knowing and comprehending the 
pure joy of consciousness. The second business 
is to act as medium, as interpreter, as agent be- 
tween the individual and his object. The mind 
should not act as a director or controller of the 
spontaneous centers. These the soul alone must 
control : the soul being that forever unknowable 
reality which causes us to rise into being. There 
is continual conflict between the soul, which is 
for ever sending forth incalculable impulses, 
and the psyche, which is conservative, and wishes 
to persist in its old motions, and the mind, which 
wishes to have "freedom," that is spasmodic, 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 191 

idea-driven control. Mind, and conservative 
psyche, and the incalculable soul, these three are 
a trinity of powers in every human being. But 
there is something even beyond these. It is the 
individual in his pure singleness, in his totality 
of consciousness, in his oneness of being: the 
Holy Ghost which is with us after our Pentecost, 
and which we may not deny. When I say to 
myself: "I am wrong," knowing with sudden 
insight that I am wrong, then this is the whole 
self speaking, the Holy Ghost. It is no piece of 
mental inference. It is not just the soul sending 
forth a flash. It is my whole being speaking in 
one voice, soul and mind and psyche transfigured 
into oneness. This voice of my being I may 
never deny. When at last, in all my storms, my 
whole self speaks, then there is a pause. The 
soul collects itself into pure silence and isolation 
— perhaps after much pain. The mind suspends 
its knowledge, and waits. The psyche becomes 
strangely still. And then, after the pause, there 
is fresh beginning, a new life adjustment. Con- 
science is the being's consciousness, when the 
individual is conscious in toto, when he knows 
in full. It is something which includes and 
which far surpasses mental consciousness. Every 
man must live as far as he can by his own soul 1 * 



192 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

conscience. But not according to any ideal. To 
submit the conscience to a creed, or an idea, or 
a tradition, or even an impulse, is our ruin. 

To make the mind the absolute ruler is as good 
as making a Cook's tourist-interpreter a king and 
a god, because he can speak several languages, 
and make an Arab understand that an English- 
man wants fish for supper. And to make an 
ideal a ruling principle is about as stupid as if 
a bunch of travelers should never cease giving 
each other and their dragoman sixpence, because 
the dragoman's main idea of virtue is the virtue 
of sixpence-giving. In the same way, we know 
we cannot live purely by impulse. Neither can 
we live solely by tradition. We must live by all 
three, ideal, impulse, and tradition, each in its 
hour. But the real guide is the pure conscience, 
the voice of the self in its wholeness, the Holy 
Ghost. 

We have fallen now into the mistake of ideal- 
ism. Man always falls into one of the three mis- 
takes. In China, it is tradition. And in the 
South Seas, it seems to have been impulse. Ours 
is idealism. Each of the three modes is a true 
life-mode. But any one, alone or dominant, 
brings us to destruction. We must depend on the 
wholeness of our being, ultimately only on that, 






THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 193 

which is our Holy Ghost within us. Whereas, 
in an ideal of love and benevolence, we have 
tried to automatize ourselves into little love- 
engines always stoked with the sorrows or beau- 
ties of other people, so that we can get up steam 
of charity or righteous wrath. A great trick is 
to pour on the fire the oil of our indignation at 
somebody else's wickedness, and then, when 
we've got up steam like hell, back the engine and 
run bish! smash! against the belly of the of- 
fender. Because he said he didn't want to love 
any more, we hate him for evermore, and try to 
run over him, every bit of him, with our love- 
tanks. And all the time we yell at him : "Will 
you deny love, you villain? Will you?" And 
by the time he faintly squeaks, "I want to be 
loved! I want to be loved!" we have got so used 
to running over him with our love-tanks that we 
don't feel in a hurry to leave off. 

"Sois mon frere, ou je te tue" 
"Sois mon frere, ou je me tue" 

There are the two parrot-threats of love, on 
which our loving centuries have run as on a pair 
of railway-lines. Excuse me if I want to get out 
of the train. Excuse me if I can't get up any 
love-steam any more. My boilers are burst. 



194 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

We have made a mistake, laying down love 
like the permanent way of a great emotional 
transport system. There we are, however, run- 
ning on wheels on the lines of our love. And of 
course we have only two directions, forwards 
and backwards. "Onward, Christian soldiers, 
towards the great terminus where bottles of ster- 
ilized milk for the babies are delivered at the 
bedroom windows by noiseless aeroplanes each 
morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect 
that teeth are planted in a man's mouth without 
his knowing it, where twilight sleep is so de- 
licious that every woman longs for her next con- 
finement, and where nobody ever has to do any- 
thing except turn a handle now and then in a 
spirit of universal love — " That is the forward 
direction of the English-speaking race. The 
Germans unwisely backed their engine. "We 
have a city of light. But instead of lying ahead 
it lies direct behind us. So reverse engines. Re- 
verse engines, and away, away to our city, where 
the sterilized milk is delivered by noiseless aero- 
planes, at the very precise minute when our 
great doctors of the Fatherland have diagnosed 
that it is good for you: where the teeth are not 
only so painlessly planted that they grow like 
living rock, but where their composition is such 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 195 

that the friction of eating stimulates the cells 
of the jaw-bone and develops the superman 
strength of will which makes us gods: and where 
not only is twilight sleep serene, but into the 
sleeper are inculcated the most useful and in- 
structive dreams, calculated to perfect the char- 
acter of the young citizen at this crucial period, 
and to enlighten permanently the mind of the 
happy mother, with regard to her new duties 
towards her child and towards our great Father- 
land " 

Here you see we are, on the railway, with New 
Jerusalem ahead, and New Jerusalem away be- 
hind us. But of course it was very wrong of the 
Germans to reverse their engines, and cause one 
long collision all along the line. Why should 
we go their way to the New Jerusalem, when of 
course they might so easily have kept on going 
our way. And now there's wreckage all along 
the line! But clear the way is our motto — or 
make the Germans clear it. Because get on we 
will. 

Meanwhile we sit rather in the cold, waiting 
for the train to get a start. People keep on sig- 
naling with green lights and red lights. And it's 
all very bewildering. 

As for me, I'm off. I'm damned if I'll be 



iq6 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

shunted along any more. And I'm thrice damned 
if I'll go another yard towards that sterilized 
New Jerusalem, either forwards or backwards. 
New Jerusalem may rot, if it waits for me. I'm 
not going. 

So good-by! There we leave humanity, en- 
camped in an appalling mess beside the railway- 
smash of love, sitting down, however, and hav- 
ing not a bad time, some of 'em, feeding them- 
selves fat on the plunder: others, further down 
the line, with mouths green from eating grass. 
But all grossly, stupidly, automatically gabbling 
about getting the love-service running again, the 
trains booked for the New Jerusalem well on the 
way once more. And occasionally a good engine 
gives a screech of love, and something seems to 
be about to happen. And sometimes there is 
enough steam to set the indignation-whistles 
whistling. But never any more will there be 
enough love-steam to get the system properly 
running. It is done. 

Good-by, then! You may have laid your line 
from one end to the other of the infinite. But 
still there's plenty of hinterland. I'll go. Good- 
by. Ach, it will be so nice to be alone : not to 
hear you, not to see you, not to smell you, hu- 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 197 

manity. I wish you no ill, but wisdom. 
Good-by! 

To be alone with one's own soul. Not to be 
alone without my own soul, mind you. But to 
be alone with one's own soul ! This, and the joy 
of it, is the real goal of love. My own soul, and 
myself. Not my ego, my conceit of myself. But 
my very soul. To be at one in my own self. Not 
to be questing any more. Not to be yearning, 
seeking, hoping, desiring, aspiring. But to 
pause, and be alone. 

And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by 
one's side, of course, to dig one in the ribs oc- 
casionally. Because really, being alone in peace 
means being two people together. Two people 
who can be silent together, and not conscious of 
one another outwardly. Me in my silence, she 
in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the 
pure circuit between us. With occasional lapses 
of course: digs in the ribs if one gets too vague 
or self-sufficient. 

They say it is better to travel than to arrive. 
It's not been my experience, at least. The jour- 
ney of love has been rather a lacerating, if well- 
worth-it, journey. But to come at last to a nice 
place under the trees, with your "amiable 
spouse" who has at last learned to hold her 



ig8 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

tongue and not to bother about rights and 
wrongs: her own particularly. And then to 
pitch a camp, and cook your rabbit, and eat him : 
and to possess your own soul in silence, and to 
feel all the clamor lapse. That is the best I 
know. 

I think it is terrible to be young. The ecstasies 
and agonies of love, the agonies and ecstasies of 
fear and doubt and drop-by-drop fulfillment, 
realization. The awful process of human rela- 
tionships, love and marital relationships espe- 
cially. Because we all make a very, very bad 
start to-day, with our idea of love in our head, 
and our sex in our head as well. All the fight 
till one is bled of one's self-consciousness and 
sex-in-the-head. All the bitterness of the con- 
flict with this devil of an amiable spouse, who 
has got herself so stuck in her own head. It is 
terrible to be young. — But one fights one's way 
through it, till one is cleaned : the self-conscious- 
ness and sex-idea burned out of one, cauterized 
out bit by bit, and the self whole again, and at 
last free. 

The best thing I have known is the stillness 
of accomplished marriage, when one possesses 
one's own soul in silence, side by side with the 
amiable spouse, and has left off craving and rav- 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 199 

ing and being only half one's self. But I must 
say, I know a great deal more about the craving 
and raving and sore ribs, than about the accom- 
plishment. And I must confess that I feel this 
self-same "accomplishment" of the fulfilled be- 
ing is only a preparation for new responsibilities 
ahead, new unison in effort and conflict, the 
effort to make, with other men, a little new way 
into the future, and to break through the hedge 
of the many. 

But — to your tents, my Israel. And to that 
precious baby you've left slumbering there. 
What I meant to say was, in each phase of life 
you have a great circuit of human relationship 
to establish and fulfill. In childhood, it is the 
circuit of family love, established at the first 
four consciousness centers, and gradually ful- 
filling itself, completing itself. At adolescence, 
the first circuit of family love should be com- 
pleted, dynamically finished. And then, it falls 
into quiescence. After puberty, family love 
should fall quiescent in a child. The love never 
breaks. It continues static and basic, the basis 
of the emotional psyche, the foundation of the 
self. It is like the moon when the moon at last 
subsides into her eternal orbit, round the earth. 
She travels in her orbit so inevitably that she 



200 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

forgets, and becomes unaware. She only knits 
her brows over the earth's greater aberrations 
in space. 

The circuit of parental love, once fulfilled, is 
not done away with, but only established into 
silence. The child is then free to establish the 
new connections, in which he surpasses his par- 
ents. And let us repeat, parents should never try 
to establish adult relations, of sympathy or in- 
terest or anything else, between themselves and 
their children. The attempt to do so only de- 
ranges the deep primary circuit which is the 
dynamic basis of our living. It is a clambering 
upwards only by means of a broken foundation. 
Parents should remain parents, children chil- 
dren, for ever, and the great gulf preserved be- 
tween the two. Honor thy father and thy mother 
should always be a leading commandment. But 
this can only take place when father and mother 
keep their true parental distances, dignity, re- 
serve, and limitation. As soon as father and 
mother try to become the friends and compan- 
ions of their children, they break the root of life, 
they rupture the deepest dynamic circuit of liv- 
ing, they derange the whole flow of life for 
themselves and their children. 

For let us reiterate and reiterate : you cannot 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 201 

mingle and confuse the various modes of dy- 
namic love. If you try, you produce horrors. 
You cannot plant the heart below the diaphragm 
or put an ocular eye in the navel. No more can 
you transfer parent love into friend love or adult 
love. Parent love is established at the great 
primary centers, where man is father and child, 
playmate and brother, but where he cannot be 
comrade or lover. Comrade and lover, this is 
the dynamic activity of the further centers, the 
second four centers. And these second four cen- 
ters must be active in the parent, their intense cir- 
cuit established even if not fulfilled, long before 
the child is born. The circuit of friendship, of 
personal companionship, of sexual love must 
needs be established before the child is begotten, 
or at least before it attains to adolescence. These 
circuits of the extended field are already fully 
established in the parent before the centers of 
correspondence in the child are even formed. 
When therefore the four great centers of the ex- 
tended consciousness arouses in a child, at ado- 
lescence, they must needs seek a strange comple- 
ment, a foreign conjunction. 

Not only is this the case, but the actual dy- 
namic impulse of the new life which rouses at 
puberty is alien to the original dynamic flow. 



202 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

The new wave-length by no means corresponds. 
The new vibration by no means harmonizes. 
Force the two together, and you cause a terrible 
frictional excitement and jarring. It is this in- 
stinctive recognition of the different dynamic 
vibrations from different centers, in different 
modes, and in different directions of positive and 
negative, which lies at the base of savage taboo. 
After puberty, members of one family should 
be taboo to one another. There should be the 
most definite limits to the degree of contact. 
And mothers-in-law should be taboo to their 
daughters' husbands, and fathers-in-law to their 
sons' wives. We must again begin to learn the 
great laws of the first dynamic life-circuits. 
These laws we now make havoc of, and conse- 
quently we make havoc of our own soul, psyche, 
mind and health. 

This book is written primarily concerning the 
child's consciousness. It is not intended to enter 
the field of the post-puberty consciousness. But 
yet, the dynamic relation of the child is estab- 
lished so directly with the physical and psychical 
soul of the parent, that to get any inkling of 
dynamic child-consciousness we must under- 
stand something of parent-consciousness. 

We assert that the parent-child love-mode ex- 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 203 

eludes the possibility of the man-and-woman, or 
friend-and-friend love mode. We assert that 
the polarity of the first four poles is inconsistent 
with the polarity of the second four poles. Nay, 
between the two great fields is a certain dynamic 
opposition, resistance, even antipathy. So that 
in the natural course of life there is no possibil- 
ity of confusing parent love and adult love. 

But we are mental creatures, and with the ex- 
plosive and mechanistic aid of ideas we can per- 
vert the whole psyche. Only, however, in a de- 
structive degree, not in a positive or constructive. 

Let us return then. In the ordinary course of 
development, by the time that the child is born 
and grown to puberty the whole dynamic soul 
of the mother is engaged: first, with the chil- 
dren, and second, on the further, higher plane, 
with the husband, and with her own friends. So 
that when the child reaches adolescence it must 
inevitably cast abroad for connection. 

But now let us remember the actual state of 
affairs to-day, when the poles are reversed be- 
tween the sexes. The woman is now the respon- 
sible party, the law-giver, the culture-bearer. 
She is the conscious guide and director of the 
man. She bears his soul between her two hands. 
And her sex is just a function or an instrument 



20 4 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

of power. This being so, the man is really the 
servant and the fount of emotion, love and 
otherwise. 

Which is all very well, while the fun lasts. 
But like all perverted processes, it is exhaustive, 
and like the fun wears out. Leaving an exhaus- 
tion, and an irritation. Each looks on the other 
as a perverter of life. Almost invariably a mar- 
ried woman, as she passes the age of thirty, con- 
ceives a dislike, or a contempt of her husband, 
or a pity which is too near contempt. Particu- 
larly if he be a good husband, a true modern. 
And he, for his part, though just as jarred inside 
himself, resents only the fact that he is not loved 
as he ought to be. 

Then starts a new game. The woman, even 
the most virtuous, looks abroad for new sym- 
pathy. She will have a new man-friend, if 
nothing more. But as a rule she has got some- 
thing more. She has got her children. 

A relation between mother and child to-day is 
practically never parental. It is personal — 
which means, it is critical and deliberate, and 
adult in provocation. The mother, in her new 
role of idealist and life-manager never, prac- 
tically for one single moment, gives her child 
the unthinking response from the deep dynamic 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 205 

centers. No, she gives it what is good for it. 
She shoves milk in its mouth as the clock strikes, 
she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, 
and she shoves it ideally through baths and mas- 
sage, promenades and practice, till the little or- 
ganism develops like a mushroom to stand on its 
own -feet. Then she continues her ideal shoving 
of it through all the stages of an ideal up-bring- 
ing, she loves it as a chemist loves his test-tubes 
in which he analyzes his salts. The poor little 
object is his mother's ideal. But of her head she 
dictates his providential days, and by the force 
of her deliberate mentally-directed love-will she 
pushes him up into boyhood. The poor little 
devil never knows one moment when he is not 
encompassed by the beautiful, benevolent, ideal- 
istic, Botticelli-pure, and finally obscene love- 
will of the mother. Never, never one mouthful 
does he drink of the milk of human kindness: 
always the sterilized milk of human benevolence. 
There is no mother's milk to-day, save in tigers' 
udders, and in the udders of sea-whales. Our 
children drink a decoction of ideal love, at the 
breast. 

Never for one moment, poor baby, the deep 
warm stream of love from the mother's bowels to 
his bowels. Never for one moment the dark 



206 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

proud recoil into rest, the soul's separation into 
deep, rich independence. Never this lovely rich 
forgetfulness, as a cat trots off and utterly forgets 
her kittens, utterly, richly forgets them, till sud- 
denly, click, the dynamic circuit reverses itself 
in her, and she remembers, and rages round in a 
frenzy, shouting for her young. 

Our miserable infants never know this joy and 
richness and pang of real maternal warmth. Our 
wonderful mothers never let us out of their 
minds for one single moment. Not for a second 
do they allow us to escape from their ideal be- 
nevolence. Not one single breath does a baby 
draw, free from the imposition of the pure, un- 
selfish, Botticelli-holy, detestable love-will of 
the mother. Always the will, the will, the love- 
will, the ideal will, directed from the ideal mind. 
Always this stone, this scorpion of maternal 
nourishment. Always this infernal self-con- 
scious Madonna starving our living guts and 
bullying us to death with her love. 

We have made the idea supplant both impulse 
and tradition. We have no spark of wholeness. 
And we live by an evil love-will. Alas, the great 
spontaneous mode is abrogated. There is no 
lovely great flux of vital sympathy, no rich re- 
joicing of pride into isolation and independence. 



THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 207 

There is no reverence for great traditions of par- 
enthood. No, there is substitute for everything 
— life-substitute — just as we have butter-sub- 
stitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, 
and leather-substitute, and silk-substitute, so we 
have life-substitute. We have beastly benevo- 
lence, and foul good-will, and stinking charity, 
and poisonous ideals. 

The poor modern brat, shoved horribly into 
life by an effort of will, and shoved up towards 
manhood by every appliance that can be applied 
to it, especially the appliance of the maternal 
will, it is really too pathetic to contemplate. The 
only thing that prevents us wringing our hands 
is the remembrance that the little devil will 
grow up and beget other similar little devils of 
his own, to invent more aeroplanes and hospitals 
and germ-killers a'nd food-substitutes and poison 
gases. The problem of the future is a question 
of the strongest poison-gas. Which is certainly 
a very sure way out of our vicious circle. 

There is no way out of a vicious circle, of 
course, except breaking the circle. And since 
the mother-child relationship is to-day the 
viciousest of circles, what are we to do? Just 
wait for the results of the poison-gas competi- 
tion presumably. 



208 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

Oh, ideal humanity, how detestable and de- 
spicable you are! And how you deserve your 
own poison-gases! How you deserve to perish 
in your own stink. 

It is no use contemplating the development of 
the modern child, born out of the mental-con- 
scious love-will, born to be another unit of self- 
conscious love-will: an ideal-born beastly little 
entity with a devil's own will of its own, benevo- 
lent, of course, and a Satan's own seraphic self- 
consciousness, like a beastly Botticelli brat. 

Once we really consider this modern process 
of life and the love-will, we could throw the 
pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the 
inventors of poison-gas. Is there not an Ameri- 
can who is supposed to have invented a breath 
of heaven whereby, drop one pop-cornful in 
Hampstead, one in Brixton, one in East Ham, 
and one in Islington, and London is a Pompeii 
in five minutes! Or was the American only 
bragging? Because anyhow, whom has he ex- 
perimented on? I read it in the newspaper, 
though. London a Pompeii in five minutes. 
Makes the gods look silly! 



CHAPTER XII 

LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS 

I THOUGHT I'd better turn over a new leaf, 
and start a new chapter. The intention of 
the last chapter was to find a way out of the 
vicious circle. And it ended in poison-gas. 

Yes, dear reader, so it did. But you've not 
silenced me yet, for all that. 

We're in a nasty mess. We're in a vicious 
circle. And we're making a careful study of 
poison-gases. The secret of Greek fire was lost 
long ago, when the world left off being wonder- 
ful and ideal. Now it is wonderful and ideal 
again, much wonderfuller and much more ideal. 
So we ought to do something rare in the way of 
poison-gas. London a Pompeii in five minutes! 
How to outdo Vesuvius! — title of a new book 
by American authors. 

There is only one single other thing to do. 

And it's more difficult than poison-gas. It is. to 

leave off loving. It is to leave off benevolent- 

ing and having a good will. It is to cease 

209 



210 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

utterly. Just leave off. Oh, parents, see that 
your children get their dinners and clean 
sheets, but don't love them. Don't love them 
one single grain, and don't let anybody else 
love them. Give them their dinners and leave 
them alone. You've already loved them to per- 
dition. Now leave them alone, to find their own 
way out. 

Wives, don't love your husbands any more: 
even if they cry for it, the great babies! Sing: 
"I've had enough of that old sauce." And leave 
off loving them or caring for them one single 
bit. Don't even hate them or dislike them. 
Don't have any stew with them at all. Just boil 
the eggs and fill the salt-cellars and be quite 
nice, and in your own soul, be alone and be still. 
Be alone, and be still, preserving all the human 
decencies, and abandoning the indecency of de- 
sires and benevolencies and devotions, those 
beastly poison-gas apples of the Sodom vine of 
the love-will. 

Wives, don't love your husbands nor your 
children nor anybody. Sit still, and say Hush! 
And while you shake the duster out of the draw- 
ing-room window, say to yourself — "In the 
sweetness of solitude." And when your hus- 
band comes in and says he's afraid he's got a 



LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS 211 

cold and is going to have double pneumonia, 
say quietly "surely not." And if he wants the 
ammoniated quinine, give it him if he can't 
get it for himself. But don't let him drive you 
out of your solitude, your singleness within your- 
self. And if your little boy falls down the steps 
and makes his mouth bleed, nurse and comfort 
him, but say to yourself, even while you tremble 
with the shock: "Alone. Alone. Be alone, my 
soul." And if the servant smashes three electric- 
light bulbs in three minutes, say to her : "How 
very inconsiderate and careless of you!" But 
say to yourself : "Don't hear it, my soul. Don't 
take fright at the pop of a light-bulb." 

Husbands, don't love your wives any more. 
If they flirt with men younger or older than 
yourselves, let your blood not stir. If you can go 
away, go away. But if you must stay and see her, 
then say to her, "I would rather you didn't flirt in 
my presence, Eleanora." Then, when she goes red 
and loosens torrents of indignation, don't answer 
any more. And when she floods into tears, say 
quietly in your own self, "My soul is my own" ; 
and go away, be alone as much as possible. And 
when she works herself up, and says she must 
have love or she will die, then say: "Not my 
love, however." And to all her threats, her 



212 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

tears, her entreaties, her reproaches, her cajole- 
ments, her winsomenesses, answer nothing, but 
say to yourself: "Shall I be implicated in this 
display of the love-will? Shall I be blasted by 
this false lightning?" And though you tremble 
in every fiber, and feel sick, vomit-sick with the 
scene, still contain yourself, and say, "My soul 
is my own. It shall not be violated." And 
learn, learn, learn the one and only lesson worth 
learning at last. Learn to walk in the sweetness 
of the possession of your own soul. And whether 
your wife weeps as she takes off her amber beads 
at night, or whether your neighbor in the train 
sits in your coat bottoms, or whether your 
superior in the office makes supercilious re- 
marks, or your inferior is familiar and impu- 
dent; or whether you read in the newspaper that 
Lloyd George is performing another iniquity, 
or the Germans plotting another plot, say to 
yourself: "My soul is my own. My soul is 
with myself, and beyond implication." And 
wait, quietly, in possession of your own soul, till 
you meet another man who has made the choice, 
and kept it. Then you will know him by the 
look on his face: half a dangerous look, a look 
of Cain, and half a look of gathered beauty. 



LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS 213 

Then you two will make the nucleus of a new 
society — Ooray! Bis! Bis!! 

But if you should never meet such a man : and 
if your wife should torture you every day with 
her love-will : and even if she should force her- 
self into a consumption, like Catherine Linton 
in "Wuthering Heights," owing to her obstinate 
and determined love-will (which is quite an- 
other matter than love) : and if you see the 
world inventing poison-gas and falling into its 
poisoned grave : never give in, but be alone, and 
utterly alone with your own soul, in the still- 
ness and sweet possession of your own soul. 
And don't even be angry. And never be sad. 
Why should you? It's not your affair. 

But if your wife should accomplish for herself 
the sweetness of her own soul's possession, then 
gently, delicately let the new mode assert itself, 
the new mode of relation between you, with 
something of spontaneous paradise in it, the 
apple of knowledge at last digested. But, my 
word, what belly-aches meanwhile. That apple 
is harder to digest than a lead gun-cartridge. 



CHAPTER XIII 

COSMOLOGICAL 

WELL, dear reader, Chapter XII was short, 
and I hope you found it sweet. 

But remember, this is an essay on Child Con- 
sciousness, not a tract on Salvation. It isn't my 
fault that I am led at moments into exhortation. 

Well, then, what about it? One fact now 
seems very clear — at any rate to me. We've got 
to pause. We haven't got to gird our loins with 
a new frenzy and our larynxes with a new Glory 
Song. Not a bit of it. Before you dash off to 
put salt on the tail of a new religion or of a new 
Leader of Men, dear reader, sit down quietly 
and pull yourself together. Say to yourself: 
"Come now, what is it all about?" And you'll 
realize, dear reader, that you're all in a fluster, 
inwardly. Then say to yourself: "Why am I 
in such a fluster?" And you'll see you've no 
reason at all to be so : except that it's rather excit- 
ing to be in a fluster, and it may seem rather 
stale eggs to be in no fluster at all about anything. 

214 



COSMOLOGICAL 215 

And yet, dear little reader, once you consider 
it quietly, it's so much nicer not to be in a fluster. 
It's so much nicer not to feel one's deeper in- 
nards storming like the Bay of Biscay. It is 
so much better to get up and say to the waters of 
one's own troubled spirit: Peace, be still ... ! 
And they will be still . . . perhaps. 

And then one realizes that all the wild storms 
of anxiety and frenzy were only so much break- 
ing of eggs. It isn't our business to live any- 
body's life, or to die anybody's death, except our 
own. Nor to save anybody's soul, nor to put 
anybody in the right; nor yet in the wrong, 
which is more the point to-day. But to be still, 
and to ignore the false fine frenzy of the seeth- 
ing world. To turn away, now, each one into the 
stillness and solitude of his own soul. And there 
to remain in the quiet with the Holy Ghost 
which is to each man his own true soul. 

This is the way out of the vicious circle. Not 
to rush round on the periphery, like a rabbit in 
a ring, trying to break through. But to retreat 
to the very center, and there to be filled with a 
new strange stability, polarized in unfathomable 
richness with the center of centers. We are so 
silly, trying to invent devices and machines for 
flying off from the surface of the earth. Instead 



216 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

of realizing that for us the deep satisfaction lies 
not in escaping, but in getting into the perfect 
circuit of the earth's terrestrial magnetism. Not 
in breaking away. What is the good of trying 
to break away from one's own? What is the 
good of a tree desiring to fly like a bird in the 
sky, when a bird is rooted in the earth as surely 
as a tree is? Nay, the bird is only the topmost 
leaf of the tree, fluttering in the high air, but 
attached as close to the tree as any other leaf. 
Mr. Einstein's Theory of Relativity does not 
supersede the Newtonian Law of Gravitation 
or of Inertia. It only says, "Beware! The Law 
of Inertia is not the simple ideal proposition you 
would like to make of it. It is a vast complexity. 
Gravitation is not one elemental uncouth force. 
It is a strange, infinitely complex, subtle aggre- 
gate of forces." And yet, however much it may 
waggle, a stone does fall to earth if you drop it. 
We should like, vulgarly, to rejoice and say 
that the new Theory of Relativity releases us 
from the old obligation of centrality. It does 
no such thing. It only makes the old centrality 
much more strange, subtle, complex, and vital. 
It only robs us of the nice old ideal simplicity. 
Which ideal simplicity and logicalness has be- 
come such a fish-bone stuck in our throats. 



COSMOLOGICAL 217 

The universe is once more in the mental melt- 
ing-pot. And you can melt it down as long as 
you like, and mutter all the jargon and abraca- 
dabra, aldeboronti fosco fornio of science that 
mental monkey-tricks can teach you, you won't 
get anything in the end but a formula and a lie. 
The atom? Why, the moment you discover the 
atom it will explode under your nose. The 
moment you discover the ether it will evaporate. 
The moment you get down to the real basis of 
anything, it will dissolve into a thousand proble- 
matic constituents. And the more problems you 
solve, the more will spring up with their fingers 
at their nose, making a fool of you. 

There is only one clue to the universe. And 
that is the individual soul within the individual 
being. That outer universe of suns and moons 
and atoms is a secondary affair. It is the death- 
result of living individuals. There is a great 
polarity in life itself. Life itself is dual. And 
the duality is life and death. And death is not 
just shadow or mystery. It is the negative reality 
of life. It is what we call Matter and Force, 
among other things. 

Life is individual, always was individual and 
always will be. Life consists of living indi- 
viduals, and always did so consist, in the begin- 



218 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

ning of everything. There never was any uni- 
verse, any cosmos, of which the first reality was 
anything but living, incorporate individuals. I 
don't say the individuals were exactly like you 
and me. And they were never wildly different. 

And therefore it is time for the idealist and 
the scientist — they are one and the same, really 
— to stop his monkey-jargon about the atom and 
the origin of life and the mechanical clue to 
the universe. There isn't any such thing. I 
might as well say: "Then they took the cart, and 
rubbed it all over with grease. Then they 
sprayed it with white wine, and spun round the 
right wheel five hundred revolutions to the 
minute and the left wheel, in the opposite direc- 
tion, seven hundred and seventy-seven revolu- 
tions to the minute. Then a burning torch was 
applied to each axle. And lo, the footboard of 
the cart began to swell, and suddenly as the cart 
groaned and writhed, the horse was born, and 
lay panting between the shafts." The whole 
scientific theory of the universe is not worth such 
a tale: that the cart conceived and gave birth to 
the horse. 

I do not believe one-fifth of what science can 
tell me about the sun. I do not believe for one 
second that the moon is a dead world spelched 



COSMOLOGICAL 219 

off from our globe. I do not believe that the 
stars came flying off from the sun like drops of 
water when you spin your wet hanky. I have 
believed it for twenty years, because it seemed 
so ideally plausible. Now I don't accept any 
ideal plausibilities at all. I look at the moon 
and the stars, and I know I don't believe any- 
thing that I am told about them. Except that I 
like their names, Aldebaran and Cassiopeia, and 
so on. 

I have tried, and even brought myself to be- 
lieve in a clue to the outer universe. And in 
the process I have swallowed such a lot of jargon 
that I would rather listen now to a negro witch- 
doctor than to Science. There is nothing in the 
world that is true except empiric discoveries 
which work in actual appliances. I know that 
the sun is hot. But I won't be told that the sun 
is a ball of blazing gas which spins round and 
fizzes. No, thank you. 

At length, for my part, I know that life, and 
life only is the clue to the universe. And that 
the living individual is the clue to life. And 
that it always was so, and always will be so. 

When the living individual dies, then is the 
realm of death established. Then you get Mat- 
ter and Elements and atoms and forces and sun 



220 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

and moon and earth and stars and so forth. In 
short, the outer universe, the Cosmos. The 
Cosmos is nothing but the aggregate of the dead 
bodies and dead energies of bygone individuals. 
The dead bodies decompose as we know into 
earth, air, and water, heat and radiant energy 
and free electricity and innumerable other sci- 
entific facts. The dead souls likewise decom- 
pose — or else they don't decompose. But if they 
do decompose, then it is not into any elements 
of Matter and physical energy. They decom- 
pose into some psychic reality, and into some 
potential will. They reenter into the living 
psyche of living individuals. The living soul 
partakes of the dead souls, as the living breast 
partakes of the outer air, and the blood partakes 
of the sun. The soul, the individuality, never 
resolves itself through death into physical con- 
stituents. The dead soul remains always soul, 
and always retains its individual quality. And 
it does not disappear, but reenters into the soul 
of the living, of some living individual or indi- 
viduals. And there it continues its part in life, 
as a death-witness and a life-agent. But it does 
not, ordinarily, have any separate existence 
there, but is incorporate in the living individual 
soul. But in some extraordinary cases, the dead 



COSMOLOGICAL 221 

soul may really act separately in a living indi- 
vidual. 

How this all is, and what are the laws of the 
relation between life and death, the living and 
the dead, I don't know. But that this relation 
exists, and exists in a manner as I describe it, 
for my own part I know. And I am fully aware 
that once we direct our living attention this way, 
instead of to the absurdity of the atom, then we 
have a whole living universe of knowledge be- 
fore us. The universe of life and death, of 
which we, whose business it is to live and to die, 
know nothing. Whilst concerning the universe 
of Force and Matter we pile up theories and 
make staggering and disastrous discoveries of 
machinery and poison-gas, all of which we were 
much better without. 

It is life we have to live by, not machines and 
ideals. And life means nothing else, even, but 
the spontaneous living soul which is our central 
reality. The spontaneous, living, individual 
soul, this is the clue, and the only clue. All the 
rest is derived. 

How it is contrived that the individual soul 
in the living sways the very sun in its centrality, 
I do not know. But it is so. It is the peculiar 
dynamic polarity of the living soul in every weed 



222 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

or bug or beast, each one separately and indi- 
vidually polarized with the great returning 
pole of the sun, that maintains the sun alive. 
For I take it that the sun is the great sympathetic 
center of our inanimate universe. I take it that 
the sun breathes in the effluence of all that fades 
and dies. Across space fly the innumerable vibra- 
tions which are the basis of all matter. They 
fly, breathed out from the dying and the dead, 
from all that which is passing away, even in the 
living. These vibrations, these elements pass 
away across space, and are breathed back again. 
The sun itself is invisible as the soul. The sun 
itself is the soul of the inanimate universe, the 
aggregate clue to the substantial death, if we 
may call it so. The sun is the great active pole 
of the sympathetic death-activity. To the sun 
fly the vibrations or the molecules in the great 
sympathy-mode of death, and in the sun they 
are renewed, they turn again as the great gift 
back again from the sympathetic death-center 
towards life, towards the living. But it is not 
even the dead which really sustain the sun. It 
is the dynamic relation between the solar plexus 
of individuals and the sun's core, a perfect cir- 
cuit. The sun is materially composed of all the 
effluence of the dead. But the quick of the 



COSMOLOGICAL 223 

sun is polarized with the living, the sun's quick 
is polarized in dynamic relation with the quick 
of life in all living things, that is, with the solar 
plexus in mankind. A direct dynamic connec- 
tion between my solar plexus and the sun. 

Likewise, as the sun is the great fiery, vivify- 
ing pole of the inanimate universe, the moon is 
the other pole, cold and keen and vivifying, cor- 
responding in some way to a voluntary pole. We 
live between the polarized circuit of sun and 
moon. And the moon is polarized with the lum- 
bar ganglion, primarily, in man. Sun and moon 
are dynamically polarized to our actual tissue, 
they affect this tissue all the time. 

The moon is, as it were, the pole of our par- 
ticular terrestrial volition, in the universe. 
What holds the earth swinging in space is first, 
the great dynamic attraction to the sun, and then 
counterposing assertion of independence, single- 
ness, which is polarized in the moon. The moon 
is the clue to our earth's individual identity, in 
the wide universe. 

The moon is an immense magnetic center. It 
is quite wrong to say she is a dead snowy world 
with craters and so on. I should say she is com- 
posed of some very intense element, like phos- 
phorus or radium, some element or elements 



224 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

which have very powerful chemical and kinetic 
activity, and magnetic activity, affecting us 
through space. 

It is not the sun which we see in heaven. It 
is the rushing thither and the rushing thence of 
the vibrations expelled by death from the body 
of life, and returned back again to the body of 
life. Possibly even a dead soul makes its journey 
to the sun and back, before we receive it again 
in our breast. Just as the breath we breathe out 
flies to the sun and back, before we breathe it 
in again. And as the water that evaporates rises 
right to the sun, and returns here. What we 
see is the great golden rushing thither, from the 
death exhalation, towards the sun, as a great 
cloud of bees flying to swarm upon the invisible 
queen, circling round, and loosing again. This 
is what we see of the sun. The center is invisible 
for ever. 

And of the moon the same. The moon has 
her back to us for ever. Not her face, as we like 
to think. The moon also pulls the water, as the 
sun does. But not in evaporation. The moon 
pulls by the magnetic force we call gravitation. 
Gravitation not being quite such a Newtonian 
simple apple as we are accustomed to find it, we 
are perhaps farther off from understanding the 



COSMOLOGICAL 225 

tides of the ocean than we were before the fruit 
of the tree fell to Sir Isaac's head. It is cer- 
tainly not simple little-things tumble-towards- 
big-things gravitation. In the moon's pull there 
is peculiar, quite special force exerted over 
those water-born substances, phosphorus, salt, 
and lime. The dynamic energy of salt water is 
something quite different from that of fresh 
water. And it is this dynamic energy which the 
sea gives off, and which connects it with the 
moon. And the moon is some strange coagula-. 
tion of substance such as salt, phosphorus, soda. 
It certainly isn't a snowy cold world, like a 
world of our own gone cold. Nonsense. It is 
a globe of dynamic substance like radium or 
phosphorus, coagulated upon a certain vivid 
pole of energy, which pole of energy is directly 
polarized with our earth, in opposition with 
the sun. 

The moon is born from the death of indi- 
viduals. All things, in their oneing, their unifi- 
cation into the pure, universal oneness, evaporate 
and fly like an imitation breath towards the sun. 
Even the crumbling rocks breathe themselves 
off in this rocky death, to the sun of heaven, 
during the day. 

But at the same time, during the night they 



226 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

breathe themselves off to the moon. If we come 
to think of it, light and dark are a question both 
of the third body, the intervening body, what 
we will call, by stretching a point, the indi- 
vidual. As we all know, apart from the exist- 
ence of molecules of individual matter, there is 
neither light nor dark. A universe utterly with- 
out matter, we don't know whether it is light 
or dark. Even the pure space between the sun 
and moon, the blue space, we don't know 
whether, in itself, it is light or dark. We can 
say it is light, we can say it is dark. But light 
and dark are terms which apply only to our- 
selves, the third, the intermediate, the substan- 
tial, the individual. 

If we come to think of it, light and dark only 
mean whether we have our face or our back 
towards the sun. If we have our face to the 
sun, then we establish the circuit of cosmic or 
universal or material or infinite sympathy. 
These four adjectives, cosmic, universal, ma- 
terial, and infinite are almost interchangeable, 
and apply, as we see, to that realm of the non- 
individual existence which we call the realm of 
the substantial death. It is the universe which 
has resulted from the death of individuals. And 
to this universe alone belongs the quality of in- 



COSMOLOGICAL 227 

finity: to the universe of death. Living indi- 
viduals have no infinity save in this relation to 
the total death-substance and death-being, the 
summed-up cosmos. 

Light and dark, these great wonders, are rela- 
tive to us alone. These are two vast poles of 
the cosmic energy and of material existence. 
These are the vast poles of cosmic sympathy, 
which we call the sun, and the other white pole 
of cosmic volition, which we call the moon. To 
the sun belong the great forces of heat and 
radiant energy, to the moon belong the great 
forces of magnetism and electricity, radium- 
energy, and so on. The sun is not, in any sense, 
a material body. It is an invariable intense pole 
of cosmic energy, and what we see are the par- 
ticles of our terrestrial decomposition flying 
thither and returning, as fine grains of iron 
would fly to an intense magnet, or better, as the 
draught in a room veers towards the fire, at- 
tracted infallibly, as a moth towards a candle. 
The moth is drawn to the candle as the draught 
is drawn to the fire, in the absolute spell of the 
material polarity of fire. And air escapes again, 
hot and different, from the fire. So is the sun. 

Fire, we say, is combustion. It is marvelous 
how science proceeds like witchcraft and 



228 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has 
no earthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? 
You can try and answer scientifically, till you 
are black in the face. All you can say is that 
it is that which happens when matter is raised 
to a certain temperature — and so forth and so 
forth. You might as well say, a word is that 
which happens when I open my mouth and 
squeeze my larynx and make various tricks with 
my throat muscles. All these explanations are 
so senseless. They describe the apparatus, and 
think they have described the event. 

Fire may be accompanied by combustion, but 
combustion is not necessarily accompanied by 
fire. All A is B, but all B is not A. And there- 
fore fire, no matter how you jiggle, is not identi- 
cal with combustion. Fire. FIRE. I insist 
on the absolute word. You may say that fire is 
a sum of various phenomena. I say it isn't. 
You might as well tell me a fly is a sum of wings 
and six legs and two bulging eyes. It is the fly 
which has the wings and legs, and not the legs 
and wings which somehow nab the fly into the 
middle of themselves. A fly is not a sum of 
various things. A fly is a fly, and the items of 
the sum are still fly. 

So with fire. Fire is an absolute unity in it- 



COSMOLOGICAL 229 

self. It is a dynamic polar principle. Establish 
a certain polarity between the moon-principle 
and the sun-principle, between the positive 
and negative, or sympathetic and volitional 
dynamism in any piece of matter, and you have 
fire, you have the sun-phenomenon. It is the 
sudden flare into the one mode, the sun mode, 
the material sympathetic mode. Correspond- 
ingly, establish an opposite polarity between the 
sun-principle and the water-principle, and you 
have decomposition into water, or towards 
watery dissolution. 

There are two sheer dynamic principles in our 
universe, the sun-principle and the moon-prin- 
ciple. And these principles are known to us in 
immediate contact as fire and water. The sun 
is not fire. But the principle of fire is the sun- 
principle. That is, fire is the sudden swoop 
towards the sun, of matter which is suddenly 
sun-polarized. Fire is the sudden sun-assertion, 
the release towards the one pole only. It is the 
sudden revelation of the cosmic One Polarity, 
One Identity. 

But there is another pole. There is the moon. 
And there is another absolute and visible prin- 
ciple, the principle of water. The moon is not 



230 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

water. But it is the soul of water, the invisible 
clue to all the waters. 

So that we begin to realize our visible uni- 
verse as a vast dual polarity between sun and 
moon. Two vast poles in space, invisible in 
themselves, but visible owing to the circuit 
which swoops between them, round them, the 
circuit of the universe, established at the cosmic 
poles of the sun and moon. This then is the in- 
finite, the positive infinite of the positive pole, the 
sun-pole, negative infinite of the negative pole, 
the moon-pole. And between the two infinites 
all existence takes place. 

But wait. Existence is truly a matter of prop- 
agation between the two infinites. But it needs 
a third presence. Sun-principle and moon- 
principle, embracing through the aeons, could 
never by themselves propagate one molecule of 
matter. The hailstone needs a grain of dust for 
its core. So does the universe. Midway be- 
tween the two cosmic infinites lies the third, 
which is more than infinite. This is the Holy 
Ghost Life, individual life. 

It is so easy to imagine that between them, the 
two infinites of the cosmos propagated life. But 
one single moment of pause and silence, one 
single moment of gathering the whole soul into 



COSMOLOGICAL 231 

Knowledge, will tell us that it is a falsity. It was 
the living individual soul which, dying, flung 
into space the two wings of the infinite, the two 
poles of the sun and the moon. The sun and 
the moon are the two eternal death-results of the 
death of individuals. Matter, all matter, is the 
Life-born. And what we know as inert matter, 
this is only the result of death in individuals, it 
is the dead bodies of individuals decomposed 
and resmelted between the hammer and anvil, 
fire and sand of the sun and the moon. When 
time began, the first individual died, the poles 
of the sun and moon were flung into space, and 
between the two, in a strange chaos and battle, 
the dead body was torn and melted and smelted, 
and rolled beneath the feet of the living. So 
the world was formed, always under the feet of 
the living. 

And so we have a clue to gravitation. We, 
mankind, are all one family. In our individual 
bodies burns the positive quick of all things. 
But beneath our feet, in our own earth, lies the 
intense center of our human, individual death, 
our grave. The earth has one center, to which 
we are all polarized. The circuit of our life is 
balanced on the living soul within us, as the 
positive center, and on the earth's dark center, 



232 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

the center of our abiding and eternal and sub- 
stantial death, our great negative center, away 
below. This is the circuit of our immediate 
individual existence. We stand upon our own 
grave, with our death fire, the sun, on our right 
hand, and our death-damp, the moon, on our left. 

The earth's center is no accident. It is the 
great individual pole of us who die. It is the 
center of the first dead body. It is the first germ- 
cell of death, which germ-cell threw out the 
great nuclei of the sun and the moon. To this 
center of our earth we, as humans, are eternally 
polarized, as are our trees. Inevitably, we fall 
to earth. And the clue of us sinks to the earth's 
center, the clue of our death, of our weight. 
And the earth flings us out as wings to the sun 
and moon: or as the death-germ dividing into 
two nuclei. So from the earth our radiance is 
flung to the sun, our marsh-fire to the moon, 
when we die. 

We fall into the earth. But our rising was 
not from the earth. We rose from the earthless 
quick, the unfading life. And earth, sun, and 
moon are born only of our death. But it is only 
their polarized dynamic connection with us who 
live which sustains them all in their place and 



COSMOLOGICAL 233 

maintains them all in their own activities. The 
inanimate universe rests absolutely on the life- 
circuit of living creatures, is built upon the arch 
which spans the duality of living beings. 



CHAPTER XIV 

SLEEP AND DREAMS 

THIS is going rather far, for a book — nay, 
a booklet — on the child consciousness. 
But it can't be helped. Child-consciousness it 
is. And we have to roll away the stone of a sci- 
entific cosmos from the tomb-mouth of that 
imprisoned consciousness. 

Now, dear reader, let us see where we are. 
First of all, we are ourselves — which is the re- 
frain of all my chants. We are ourselves. We 
are living individuals. And as living indi- 
viduals we are the one, pure clue to our own 
cosmos. To which cosmos living individuals 
have always been the clue, since time began, and 
will always be the clue, while time lasts. 

I know it is not so fireworky as the sudden 
evolving of life, somewhere, somewhen and 
somehow, out of force and matter with a pop. 
But that pop never popped, dear reader. The 
boot was on the other leg. And I wish I could 

234 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 235 

mix a few more metaphors, like pops and legs 
and boots, just to annoy you. 

Life never evolved, or evoluted, out of force 
and matter, dear reader. There is no such thing 
as evolution, anyhow. There is only develop- 
ment. Man was man in the very first plasm- 
speck which was his own individual origin, and 
is still his own individual origin. As for the 
origin, I don't know much about it. I only 
know there is but one origin, and that is the in- 
dividual soul. The individual soul originated 
everything, and has itself no origin. So that 
time is a matter of living experience, nothing 
else, and eternity is just a mental trick. Of 
course every living speck, amoeba or newt, has 
its own individual soul. 

And we sit on our own globe, dear reader, 
here individually located. Our own individual 
being is our own single reality. But the single 
reality of the individual being is dynamically 
and directly polarized to the earth's center, 
which is the aggregate negative center of all 
terrestrial existence. In short, the center which 
in life we thrust away from, and towards which 
we fall, in death. For, our individual exist- 
ence being positive, we must have a negative 
pole to thrust away from. And when our posi- 
tive individual existence breaks, and we fall into 



236 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

death, our wonderful individual gravitation- 
center succumbs to the earth's gravitation- 
center. 

So there we are, individuals, single, life-born, 
life-living, yet all the while poised and polarized 
to the aggregate center of our substantial death, 
our earth's quick, powerful center-clue. 

There may be other individuals, alive, and 
having other worlds under their feet, polarized 
to their own globe's center. But the very sacred- 
ness of my own individuality prevents my pro- 
nouncing about them, lest I, in attributing 
qualities to them, transgress against the pure in- 
dividuality which is theirs, beyond me. 

If, however, there be truly other people, with 
their own world under their feet, then I think it 
is fair to say that we all have our infinite identity 
in the sun. That in the rush and swirl of death 
we pass through fiery ways to the same sun. And 
from the sun, can the spores of souls pass to the 
various worlds? And to the worlds of the cos- 
mos seed across space, through the wild beams 
of the sun? Is there seed of Mars in my veins? 
And is astrology not altogether nonsense? 

But if the sun is the center of our infinite one- 
ing in death with all the other after-death souls 
of the cosmos : and in that great central station 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 237 

of travel, the sun, we meet and mingle and 
change trains for the stars: then ought we to 
assume that the moon is likewise a meeting-place 
of dead souls? The moon surely is a meeting- 
place of cold, dead, angry souls. But from our 
own globe only. 

The moon is the center of our terrestrial indi- 
viduality in the cosmos. She is the declaration 
of our existence in separateness. Save for the 
intense white recoil of the moon, the earth 
would stagger towards the sun. The moon holds 
us to our own cosmic individuality, as a world 
individual in space. She is the fierce center of re- 
traction, of frictional withdrawal into separate- 
ness. She it is who sullenly stands with her back 
to us, and refuses to meet and mingle. She it is 
who burns white with the intense friction of her 
withdrawal into separation, that cold, proud 
white fire of furious, almost malignant apart- 
ness, the struggle into fierce, frictional separa- 
tion. Her white fire is the frictional fire of the 
last strange, intense watery matter, as this mat- 
ter fights its way out of combination and out of 
combustion with the sun-stuff. To the pure 
polarity of the moon fly the essential waters of 
our universe. Which essential waters, at the 



238 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

moon's clue, are only an intense invisible energy, 
a polarity of the moon. 

There are only three great energies in the uni- 
versal life, which is always individual and 
which yet sways all the physical forces as well 
as the vital energy; and then the two great 
dynamisms of the sun and the moon. To the 
dynamism of the sun belong heat, expansion- 
force, and all that range. To the dynamism of 
the moon the essential watery forces: not just 
gravitation, but electricity, magnetism, radium- 
energy, and so on. 

The moon likewise is the pole of our night 
activities, as the sun is the pole of our day activi- 
ties. Remember that the sun and moon are but 
great self-abandons which individual life has 
thrown out, to the right hand and to the left. 
When individual life dies, it flings itself on the 
right hand to the sun, on the left hand to the 
moon, in the dual polarity, and sinks to earth. 
When any man dies, his soul divides in death; 
as in life, in the first germ, it was united from 
two germs. It divides into two dark germs, 
flung asunder : the sun-germ and the moon-germ. 
Then the material body sinks to earth. And so 
we have the cosmic universe such as we know it. 

What is the exact relationship between us and 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 239 

the death-realm of the afterwards we shall never 
know. But this relation is none the less active 
every moment of our lives. There is a pure 
polarity between life and death, between the 
living and the dead, between each living indi- 
vidual and the outer cosmos. Between each liv- 
ing individual and the earth's center passes a 
never-ceasing circuit of magnetism. It is a cir- 
cuit which in man travels up the right side, and 
down the left side of the body, to the earth's 
center. It never ceases. But while we are 
awake it is entirely under the control and spell 
of the total consciousness, the individual con- 
sciousness, the soul, or self. When we sleep, how- 
ever, then this individual consciousness of the 
soul is suspended for the time, and we lie com- 
pletely within the circuit of the earth's magnet- 
ism, or gravitation, or both: the circuit of the 
earth's centrality. It is this circuit which is busy 
in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead 
body of our past day. For each time we lie down 
to sleep we have within us a body of death which 
dies with the day that is spent. And this body 
of death is removed or laid in line by the activi- 
ties of the earth-circuit, the great active death- 
circuit, while we sleep. 

As we sleep the current sweeps its own way 



2 4 o FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

through us, as the streets of a city are swept and 
flushed at night. It sweeps through our nerves 
and our blood, sweeping away the ash of our 
day's spent consciousness towards one form or 
other of excretion. This earth-current actively 
sweeping through us is really the death-activity 
busy in the service of life. It behooves us to know 
nothing of it. And as it sweeps it stimulates in 
the primary centers of consciousness vibrations 
which flash images upon the mind. Usually, in 
deep sleep, these images pass unrecorded; but 
as we pass towards the twilight of dawn and 
wakefulness, we begin to retain some impres- 
sion, some record of the dream-images. Usually 
also the images that are accidentally swept into 
the mind in sleep are as disconnected and as un- 
meaning as the pieces of paper which the street 
cleaners sweep into a bin from the city gutters 
at night. We should not think of taking all 
these papers, piecing them together, and making 
a marvelous book of them, prophetic of the 
future and pregnant with the past. We should 
not do so, although every rag of printed paper 
swept from the gutter would have some connec- 
tion with the past day's event. But its signifi- 
cance, the significance of the words printed upon 
it is so small, that we relegate it into the limbo 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 241 

of the accidental and meaningless. There is no 
vital connection between the many torn bits of 
paper — only an accidental connection. Each 
bit of paper has reference to some actual event: 
a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop 
bag, a newspaper, a hand-bill. But take them 
all together, bus-ticket, torn envelope, tract, 
paper-bag, piece of newspaper and hand-bill, 
and they have no individual sequence, they be- 
long more to the mechanical arrangements than 
to the vital consequence of our existence. And 
the same with most dreams. They are the hetero- 
geneous odds and ends of images swept together 
accidentally by the besom of the night-current, 
and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real 
importance to them. It is always beneath our 
dignity to go degrading the integrity of the indi- 
vidual soul by cringing and scraping among the 
rag-tag of accident and of the inferior, mechanic 
coincidence and automatic event. Only those 
events are significant which derive from or ap- 
ply to the soul in its full integrity. To go kow- 
towing before the facts of change, as gamblers 
and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a 
perverting of the soul's proud integral priority, 
a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes. 

Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it 



242 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

is the sign of a weak and paltry nature to pay any 
attention to them whatever. Only occasionally 
they matter. And this is only when something 
threatens us from the outer mechanical, or acci- 
dental death-world. When anything threatens 
us from the world of death, then a dream may 
become so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. 
And when a dream is so intense that it arouses 
the soul — then we must attend to it. 

But we may have the most appalling night- 
mare beca.use we eat pancakes for supper. Here 
again, we are threatened with an arrest of the 
mechanical flow of the system. This arrest be- 
comes so serious that it affects the great organs 
of the heart and lungs, and these organs affect 
the primary conscious-centers. 

Now we shall see that this is the direct reverse 
of real living consciousness. In living con- 
sciousness the primary affective centers control 
the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the 
reverse takes place. The great organs, being 
obstructed in their spontaneous-automatism, at 
last with violence arouse the active conscious- 
centers. And these flash images to the brain. 

These nightmare images are very frequently 
purely mechanical : as of falling terribly down- 
wards, or being enclosed in vaults. And such 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 243 

images are pure physical transcripts. The im- 
age of falling, of flying, of trying to run and 
not being able to lift the feet, of having to creep 
through terribly small passages, these are direct 
transcripts from the physical phenomena of cir- 
culation and digestion. It is the directly tran- 
scribed image of the heart which, impeded in 
its action by the gases of indigestion, is switched 
out of its established circuit of earth-polarity, 
and is as if suspended over a void, or plunging 
into a void: step by step, falling downstairs, 
maybe, according to the strangulation of the 
heart beats. The same paralytic inability to lift 
the feet when one needs to run, in a dream, comes 
directly from the same impeded action of the 
heart, which is thrown off its balance by some 
material obstruction. Now the heart swings 
left and right in the pure circuit of the earth's 
polarity. Hinder this swing, force the heart 
over to the left, by inflation of gas from the 
stomach or by dead pressure upon the blood and 
nerves from any obstruction, and you get the 
sensation of being unable to lift the feet from 
earth: a gasping sensation. Or force the heart 
to overbalance towards the right, and you get 
the sensation of flying or of falling. The heart 
telegraphs its distress to the mind, and wakes 



244 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

us. The wakeful soul at once begins to deal 
with the obstruction, which was too much for 
the mechanical night-circuits. The same holds 
good of dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping 
through narrow passages. They are direct 
transfers from the squeezing of the blood 
through constricted arteries or heart chambers. 

Most dreams are stimulated from the blood 
into the nerves and the nerve-centers. And the 
heart is the transmission station. For the blood 
has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It 
has a deeper, elemental consciousness of the me- 
chanical or material world. In the blood we 
have the body of our most elemental conscious- 
ness, our almost material consciousness. And 
during sleep this material consciousness trans- 
fers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The 
transfer in wakefulness results in a feeling of 
pain or discomfort — as when we have indiges- 
tion, which is pure blood-discomfort. But in 
sleep the transfer is made through the dream- 
images which are mechanical phenomena like 
mirages. 

Nightmares which have purely mechanical 
images may terrify us, give us a great shock, but 
the shock does not enter our souls. We are sur- 
prised, in the morning, to find that the bristling 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 245 

horror of the night seems now just nothing — 
dwindled to nothing. And this is because what 
was a purely material obstruction in the physi- 
cal flow, temporary only, is indeed a nothingness 
to the living, integral soul. We are subject to 
such accidents — if we will eat pancakes for sup- 
per. And that is the end of it. 

But there are other dreams which linger and 
haunt the soul. These are true soul-dreams. As 
we know, life consists of reactions and interre- 
lations from the great* centers of primary con- 
sciousness. I may start a chain of connection 
from one center, which inevitably stimulates 
into activity the corresponding center. For 
example, I may develop a profound and pas- 
sional love for my mother, in my days of adoles- 
cence. This starts, willy-nilly, the whole ac- 
tivity of adult love at the lower centers. But 
admission is made only of the upper, spiritual 
love, the love dynamically polarized at the upper 
centers. Nevertheless, whether the admission 
is made or not, once establish the circuit in the 
upper or spiritual centers of adult love, and you 
will get a corresponding activity in the lower, 
passional centers of adult love. 

The activity at the lower center, however, is 
denied in the daytime. There is a repression. 



246 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

Then the friction of the night-flow liberates the 
repressed psychic activity explosively. And 
then the image of the mother figures in passion- 
ate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams. 

The Freudians point to this as evidence of a 
repressed incest desire. The Freudians are too 
simple. It is always wrong to accept a dream- 
meaning at its face value. Sleep is the time 
when we are given over to the automatic 
processes of the inanimate universe. Let us not 
forget this. Dreams are automatic in their 
nature. The psyche possesses remarkably few 
dynamic images. In the case of the boy who 
dreams of his mother, we have the aroused but 
unattached sex plunging in sleep, causing a sort 
of obstruction. We have the image of the 
mother, the dynamic emotional image. And the 
automatism of the dream-process immediately 
unites the sex-sensation to the great stock image, 
and produces an incest dream. But does this 
prove a repressed incest desire? On the con- 
trary. 

The truth is, every man has, the moment he 
awakes, a hatred of his dream, and a great de- 
sire to be free of the dream, free of the persist- 
ent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. 
It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 247 

with its hateful conclusions. And yet he can- 
not get free. As long as a man lives he may, in 
his dreams of passion or conflict, be haunted by 
the mother-image or sister-image, even when he 
knows that the cause of the disturbing dream is 
the wife. But even though the actual subject of 
the dream is the wife, still, over and over again, 
for years, the dream-process will persist in sub- 
stituting the mother-image. It haunts and terri- 
fies a man. 

Why does the dream-process act so? For two 
reasons. First, the reason of simple automatic 
continuance. The mother-image was the first 
great emotional image to be introduced in the 
psyche. The dream-process mechanically re- 
produces its stock image the moment the intense 
sympathy-emotion is aroused. Again, the 
mother-image refers only to the upper plane. 
But the dream-process is mechanical in its logic. 
Because the mother-image refers to the great 
dynamic stress of the upper plane, therefore it 
refers to the great dynamic stress of the lower. 
This is a piece of sheer automatic logic. The 
living soul is not automatic, and automatic logic 
does not apply to it. 

But for our second reason for the image. In 
becoming the object of great emotional stress 



248 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

for her son, the mother also becomes an object 
of poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. 
She arrests him from finding his proper fulfill- 
ment on the sensual plane. Now it is almost 
always the object of arrest which becomes im- 
pressed, as it were, upon the psyche. A man 
very rarely has an image of a person with whom 
he is livingly, vitally connected. He only has 
dream-images of the persons who, in some way, 
oppose his life-flow and his soul's freedom, and 
so become impressed upon his plasm as objects 
of resistance. Once a man is dynamically caught 
on the upper plane by mother or sister, then the 
dream-image of mother or sister will persist 
until the dynamic rapport between himself and 
his mother or sister is finally broken. And the 
dream-image from the upper plane will be auto- 
matically applied to the disturbance of the 
lower plane. 

Because — and this is very important — the 
dream-process loves its own automatism. It 
would force everything to an automatic-logical 
conclusion in the psyche. But the living, wake- 
ful psyche is so flexible and sensitive, it has a 
horror of automatism. While the soul really 
lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 249 

automatism. For automatism in life is a fore- 
stalling of the death process. 

The living soul has its great fear. The living 
soul fears the automatically logical conclusion 
of incest. Hence the sleep-process invariably 
draws this conclusion. The dream-process, 
fiendishly, plays a triumph of automatism over 
us. But the dream-conclusion is almost invari- 
ably just the reverse of the soul's desire, in any 
distress-dream. Popular dream-telling under- 
stood this, and pronounced that you must read 
dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and 
it means a funeral. Wish your friend well, and 
fear his death, and you will dream of his 
funeral. Every desire has its corresponding fear 
that the desire shall not be fulfilled. It is fear 
which forms an arrest-point in the psyche, hence 
an image. So the dream automatically produces 
the fear-image as the desire-image. If you 
secretly wished your enemy dead, and feared he 
might flourish, the dream would present you 
with his wedding. 

Of course this rule of inversion is too simple 
to hold good in all cases. Yet it is one of the 
most general rules for dreams, and applies most 
often to desire-and-fear dreams of a psychic 
nature. 



250 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

So that an incest-dream would not prove an 
incest-desire in the living psyche. Rather the 
contrary, a living fear of the automatic conclu- 
sion : the soul's just dread of automatism. And 
though this may sound like casuistry, I believe 
it does explain a good deal of the dream-trick. — 
That which is lovely to the automatic process is 
hateful to the spontaneous soul. The wakeful 
living soul fears automatism as it fears death: 
death being automatic. 

It seems to me these are the first two dream- 
principles, and the two most important: the 
principle of automatism and the principle of in- 
version. They will not resolve everything for 
us, but they will help a great deal. We have to 
be very wary of giving way to dreams. It is 
really a sin against ourselves to prostitute the 
living spontaneous soul to the tyranny of dreams, 
or of chance, or fortune or luck, or any of the 
processes of the automatic sphere. 

Then consider other dynamic dreams. First, 
the dream-image generally. Any significant 
dream-image is usually an image or a symbol 
of some arrest or scotch in the living spontaneous 
psyche. There is another principle. But if the 
image is a symbol, then the only safe way to ex- 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 251 

plain the symbol is to proceed from the quality 
of emotion connected with the symbol. 

For example, a man has a persistent passionate 
fear-dream about horses. He suddenly finds 
himself among great, physical horses, which 
may suddenly go wild. Their great bodies surge 
madly round him, they rear above him, threat- 
ening to destroy him. At any minute he may 
be trampled down. 

Now a psychoanalyst will probably tell you 
ofT-hand that this is a father-complex dream. 
Certain symbols seem to be put into complex 
catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary. 

Examining the emotional reference we find 
that the feeling is sensual, there is a great im- 
pression of the powerful, almost beautiful physi- 
cal bodies of the horses, the nearness, the rounded 
haunches, the rearing. Is the dynamic passion 
in a horse the danger-passion? It is a great sen- 
sual reaction at the sacral ganglion, a reaction 
of intense, sensual, dominant volition. The 
horse which rears and kicks and neighs madly 
acts from the intensely powerful sacral ganglion. 
But this intense activity from the sacral ganglion 
is male: the sacral ganglion is at its highest in- 
tensity in the male. So that the horse-dream 
refers to some arrest in the deepest sensual 



252 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

activity in the male. The horse is presented as 
an object of terror, which means that to the 
man's automatic dream-soul, which loves auto- 
matism, the great sensual male activity is the 
greatest menace. The automatic pseudo-soul, 
which has got the sensual nature repressed, 
would like to keep it repressed. Whereas the 
greatest desire of the living spontaneous soul is 
that this very male sensual nature, represented 
as a menace, shall be actually accomplished in 
life. The spontaneous self is secretly yearning 
for the liberation and fulfillment of the deepest 
and most powerful sensual nature. There may 
be an element of father-complex. The horse 
may also refer to the powerful sensual being in 
the father. The dream may mean a love of the 
dreamer for the sensual male who is his father. 
But it has nothing to do with incest. The love 
is probably a just love. 

The bull-dream is a curious reversal. In the 
bull the centers of power are in the breast and 
shoulders. The horns of the head are symbols 
of this vast power in the upper self. The 
woman's fear of the bull is a great terror of the 
dynamic upper centers in man. The bull's 
horns, instead of being phallic, represent the 
enormous potency of the upper centers. A 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 253 

woman whose most positive dynamism is in the 
breast and shoulders is fascinated by the bull. 
Her dream-fear of the bull and his horns which 
may run into her may be reversed to a signifi- 
cance of desire for connection, not from the cen- 
ters of the lower, sensual self, but from the in- 
tense physical centers of the upper body: the 
phallus polarized from the upper centers, and 
directed towards the great breast center of the 
woman. Her wakeful fear is terror of the great 
breast-and-shoulder, upper rage and power of 
man, which may pierce her defenseless lower 
self. The terror and the desire are near together 
— and go with an admiration of the slender, ab- 
stracted bull loins. 

Other dream-fears, or strong dream-impres- 
sions, may be almost imageless. They may be a 
great terror, for example, of a purely geometric 
figure — a figure from pure geometry, or an ex- 
ample of pure mathematics. Or they may have 
no image, but only a sensation of smell, or of 
color, or of sound. 

These are the dream-fears of the soul which 
is falling out of human integrity into the purely 
mechanical mode. If we idealize ourselves 
sufficiently, the spontaneous centers do at last 
work only, or almost only, in the mechanical 



254 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

mode. They have no dynamic relation with an- 
other being. They cannot have. Their whole 
power of dynamic relationship is quenched. 
They act now in reference purely to the me- 
chanical world, of force and matter, sensation 
and law. So that in dream-activity sensation or 
abstraction, abstract law or calculation occurs 
as the predominant or exclusive image. In the 
dream there may be a sensation of admiration 
or delight. The waking sensation is fear. Be- 
cause the soul fears above all things its fall from 
individual integrity into the mechanic activity 
of the outer world, which is the automatic 
death-world. 

And this is our danger to-day. We tend, 
through deliberate idealism or deliberate ma- 
terial purpose, to destroy the soul in its first 
nature of spontaneous, integral being, and to 
substitute the second nature, the automatic 
nature of the mechanical universe. For this 
purpose we stay up late at night, and we rise 
late in the morning. 

To stay up late into the night is always bad. 
Let us be as ideal as we may, when the sun goes 
down the natural mode of life changes in us. 
The mind changes its activity. As the soul grad- 
ually goes passive, before yielding up its sway, 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 255 

the mind falls into its second phase of activity. 
It collects the results of the spent day into con- 
sciousness, lays down the honey of quiet thought, 
or the bitter-sweet honey of the gathered flower. 
It is the consciousness of that which is past. 
Evening is our time to read history and tragedy 
and romance — all of which are the utterance of 
that which is past, that which is over, that which 
is finished, is concluded: either sweetly con- 
cluded, or bitterly. Evening is the time for this. 

But evening is the time also for revelry, for 
drink, for passion. Alcohol enters the blood 
and acts as the sun's rays act. It inflames into 
life, it liberates into energy and consciousness. 
But by a process of combustion. That life of the 
day which we have not lived, by means of sun- 
born alcohol we can now flare into sensation, 
consciousness, energy and passion, and live it 
out. It is a liberation from the laws of idealism, 
a release from the restriction of control and 
fear. It is the blood bursting into consciousness. 
But naturally the course of the liberated con- 
sciousness may be in either direction: sharper 
mental action, greater fervor of spiritual emo- 
tion, or deeper sensuality. Nowadays the last 
is becoming much more unusual. 

The active mind-consciousness of the night is 



256 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

a form of retrospection, or else it is a form of 
impulsive exclamation, direct from the blood, 
and unbalanced. Because the active physical 
consciousness of the night is the blood-conscious- 
ness, the most elemental form of consciousness. 
Vision is perhaps our highest form of dynamic 
upper consciousness. But our deepest lower 
consciousness is blood-consciousness. 

And the dynamic lower centers are swayed 
from the blood. When the blood rouses into its 
night intensity, it naturally kindles first the 
lowest dynamic centers. It transfers its voice 
and its fire to the great hypogastric plexus, 
which governs, with the help of the sacral gan- 
glion, the flow of urine through us, but which 
also voices the deep swaying of the blood in sex 
passion. Sex is our deepest form of conscious- 
ness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is 
pure blood-consciousness. It is the basic con- 
sciousness of the blood, the nearest thing in us 
to pure material consciousness. It is the con- 
sciousness of the night, when the soul is almost 
asleep. 

The blood-consciousness is the first and last 
knowledge of the living soul : the depths. It is 
the soul acting in part only, speaking with its 
first hoarse half-voice. And blood-conscious- 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 257 

ness cannot operate purely until the soul has put 
off all its manifold degrees and forms of upper 
consciousness. As the self falls back into 
quiescence, it draws itself from the brain, from 
the great nerve-centers, into the blood, where at 
last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itself 
livingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful 
hour, it sends out its great call. For even the 
blood is alone and in part, and needs an answer. 
Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is 
divided in a dual polarity between the sexes. As 
the night falls and the consciousness sinks deeper, 
suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. 
Suddenly the deep centers of the sexual con- 
sciousness rouse to their spontaneous activity. 
Suddenly there is a deep circuit established be- 
tween me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of 
blood which is me heaves and rushes towards the 
sea of blood which is her. There is a moment of 
pure f rictional crisis and contact of blood. And 
then all the blood in me ebbs back into its ways, 
transmuted, changed. And this is the profound 
basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal. 

And this has nothing to do with pretty faces 
or white skin or rosy breasts or any of the rest 
of the trappings of sexual love. These trap- 
pings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands 



258 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

nor mouth have anything to do with the final 
massive and dark collision of the blood in the 
sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric 
transmutation passes through the blood of the 
man and the blood of the woman. They fall 
apart and sleep in their transmutation. 

But even in its profoundest, and most ele- 
mental movements, the soul is still individual. 
Even in its most material consciousness, it is 
still integral and individual. You would think 
the great blood-stream of mankind was one and 
homogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly 
one, more near to homogeneity than anything 
else within us. The blood-stream of mankind 
is almost homogeneous. 

But it isn't homogeneous. In the first place, 
it is dual in a perfect dark dynamic polarity, the 
sexual polarity. No getting away from the fact 
that the blood of woman is dynamically polar- 
ized in opposition, or in difference to the blood 
of man. The crisis of their contact in sex con- 
nection is the moment of establishment of a new 
flashing circuit throughout the whole sea: the 
dark, burning red waters of our under-world 
rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. 
And then in the second place, the blood of an in- 
dividual is his own blood. That is, it is indi- 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 259 

vidual. And though we have a potential 
dynamic sexual connection, we men, with almost 
every woman, yet the great outstanding fact of 
the individuality even of the blood makes us 
need a corresponding individuality in the woman 
we are to embrace. The more individual the 
man or woman, the more unsatisfactory is a non- 
individual connection: promiscuity. The more 
individual, the more does our blood cry out for 
its own specific answer, an individual woman, 
blood-polarized with us. 

We have made the mistake of idealism again. 
We have thought that the woman who thinks 
and talks as we do will be the blood-answer. 
And we force it to be so. To our disaster. The 
woman who thinks and talks as we do is almost 
sure to have no dynamic blood-polarity with us. 
The dynamic blood-polarity would make her 
different from me, and not like me in her 
thought mode. Blood-sympathy is so much 
deeper than thought-mode, that it may result in 
very different expression, verbally. 

We have made the mistake of turning life in- 
side out: of dragging the day-self into the night, 
and spreading the night-self over into the day. 
We have made love and sex a matter of seeing 
and hearing and of day-conscious manipulation. 



260 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

We have made men and women come together 
on the grounds of this superficial likeness and 
commonalty — their mental, and upper sym- 
pathetic consciousness. And so we have forced 
the blood to submission. Which means we force 
it into disintegration. 

We have too much light in the night, and too 
much sleep in the day. It is an evil thing for 
us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, ideal 
consciousness far into the night when the hour 
has come for this upper consciousness to fade, 
for the blood alone to know and to act. By pro- 
voking the reaction of the great blood-stress, the 
sex-reaction, from the upper, outer mental con- 
sciousness and mental lasciviousness of conscious 
purpose, we thereby destroy the very blood in 
our bodies. We prevent it from having its own 
dynamic sway. We prevent it from coming to 
its own dynamic crisis and connection, from 
finding its own fundamental being. No matter 
how we work our sex, from the upper or outer 
consciousness, we don't achieve anything but the 
falsification and impoverishment of our own 
blood-life. We have no choice. Either we must 
withdraw from interference, or slowly de- 
teriorate. 

We have made a corresponding mistake in 



SLEEP AND DREAMS 261 

sleeping on into the day. Once the sun rises our 
constitution changes. Once the sun is well up 
our sleep — supposing our life fairly normal — 
is no longer truly sleep. When the sun comes 
up the centers of active dynamic upper con- 
sciousness begin to wake. The blood changes 
its vibration and even its chemical constitution. 
And then we too ought to wake. We do our- 
selves great damage by sleeping too long into 
the day. The half-hour's sleep after midday 
meal is a readjustment. But the long hours of 
morning sleep are just a damage. We submit 
our now active centers of upper consciousness 
to the dominion of the blood-automatic flow. 
We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. 
We transmute the morning's blood-strength into 
false dreams and into an ever-increasing force 
of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of 
inertia we persist from bad to worse. 

With the result that our chained-down, active 
nerve-centers are half-shattered before we arise. 
We never become newly day-conscious, bcause 
we have subjected our powerful centers of day- 
consciousness to be trampled and wasted into 
dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of the 
blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then 
we arise with a feeling of the monotony and 



262 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

automatism of life. There is no good, glad re- 
freshing. We feel tired to start with. And 
so we protract our day-consciousness on into 
the night, when we do at last begin to come 
awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, 
sleep, sleep in the morning and the day-time. 
It is better to sleep only six hours than to pro- 
long sleep on and on when the sun has risen. 
Every man and woman should be forced out of 
bed soon after the sun has risen : particularly the 
nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. 
Soon after dawn the vast majority of people 
should be hard at work. If not, they will soon 
be nervously diseased. 



CHAPTER XV 

\ THE LOWER SELF 

SO it comes about that the moon is the planet 
of our nights, as the sun of our days. And 
this is not just accidental, or even mechanical. 
The influence of the moon upon the tides and 
upon us is not just an accident in phenomena. 
It is the result of the creation of the universe by- 
life itself. It was life itself which threw the 
moon apart on the one hand, the sun on the 
other. And it is life itself which keeps the 
dynamic-vital relation constant between the 
moon and the living individuals of the globe. 
The moon is as dependent upon the life of indi- 
viduals, for her continued existence, as each 
single individual is dependent upon the moon. 
The same with the sun. The sun sets and has 
his perfect polarity in the life-circuit established 
between him and all living individuals. Break 
that circuit and the sun breaks. Without man, 
beasts, butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would 

gutter out like a spent lamp. It is the life-emis- 

263 



264 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

sion from individuals which feeds his burning 
and establishes his sun-heart in its powerful 
equilibrium. 

The same with the moon. She lives from us, 
primarily, and we from her. Everything is a 
question of relativity. Not only is every force 
relative to other force or forces, but every exist- 
ence is relative to other existences. Not only 
does the life of man depend on man, beast, and 
herb, but on the sun and moon, and the stars. 
And in another manner, the existence of the 
moon depends absolutely on the life of herb, 
beast, and man. The existence of the moon de- 
pends upon the life of individuals, that which 
alone is original. Without the life of individuals 
the moon would fall asunder. And the moon 
particularly, because she is polarized dynam- 
ically to this, our own earth. We do not know 
what far-off life breathes between the stars and 
the sun. But our life alone supports the moon. 
Just as the moon is the pole of our single terres- 
trial individuality. 

Therefore we must know that between the 
moon and each individual being exists a vital 
dynamic flow. The life of individuals depends 
directly upon the moon, just as the moon depends 
directly upon the life of individuals. 



THE LOWER SELF 265 

But in what way does the life of individuals 
depend directly upon the moon? 

The moon is the mother of darkness. She is 
the clue to the active darkness. And we, below 
the waist, we have our being in darkness. Below 
the waist we are sightless. When, in the day- 
time, our life is polarized upwards, towards the 
open, sun-wakened eyes and the mind which sees 
in vision, then the powerful dynamic centers of 
the lower body act in subservience, in their nega- 
tive polarity. And then we flow upwards, we go 
forth seeking the universe, in vision, speech, and 
thought — we go forth to see all things, to hear 
all things, to know all things by acquaintance 
and by knowledge. One flood of dynamic flow 
are we, upwards polarized, in our tallness and 
our wide-eyed spirit seeking to bring all the uni- 
verse into the range of our conscious individual- 
ity, and eager always to make new worlds, out of 
this old world, to bud new green tips on the tree 
of life. Just as a tree would die if it were not 
making new green tips upon all its vast old world 
of a body, so the whole universe would perish if 
man and beast and herb were not always putting 
forth a newness : the toad taking a vivider color, 
spreading his hands a little more gently, develop- 
ing a more ruse intelligence, the birds adding a 



266 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

new note to their speech and song, a new sharp 
swerve to their flight, a new nicety to their nests; 
and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. 
If it were not for this striving into new creation 
on the part of living individuals, the universe 
would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall 
asunder. Like a tree that ceases to put forth new 
green tips, and to advance out a little further. 

But each new tip arises out of the apparent 
death of the old, the preceding one. Old leaves 
have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men 
must at certain periods fall into death in mil- 
lions, why, so must the leaves fall every single 
autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. 
And so dead men. Even dead men's souls. 

So if death has to be the goal for a great num- 
ber, then let it be so. If America must invent 
this poison-gas, let her. When death is our goal 
of goals we shall invent the means of death, let 
our professions of benevolence be what they will. 

But this time, it seems to me, we have con- 
sciously and responsibly to carry ourselves 
through the winter-period, the period of death 
and denudation: that is, some of us have, some 
nation even must. For there are not now, as in 
the Roman times, any great reservoirs of ener- 
getic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, 



THE LOWER SELF 267 

Slavs, Tartars. The world is very full of people, 
but all fixed in civilizations of their own, and 
they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, 
and all our means of destruction. This time, the 
leading civilization cannot die out as Greece, 
Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great col- 
lapse, maybe. But it must carry through all the 
collapse the living clue to the next civilization. 
It's no good thinking we can leave it to China 
or Japan or India or Africa — any of the great 
swarms. 

And here we are, we don't look much like car- 
rying through to a new era. What have we got 
that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr. 
Einstein's Relativity Theory. Curious that 
everybody catches fire at the word Relativity. 
There must be something in the mere suggestion, 
which we have been waiting for. But what? 
As far as I can see, Relativity means, for the 
common amateur mind, that there is no one abso- 
lute force in the physical universe, to which all 
other forces may be referred. There is no one 
single absolute central principle governing the 
world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical 
principles can only be known in their relation to 
one another, and can only exist in their relation 
to one another. But, says Einstein, this relation 



268 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

between the mechanical forces is constant, and 
may be expressed by a mathematical formula: 
which mathematical formula may be used to 
equate all mechanical forces of the universe. 

I hope that is not scientifically all wrong. It 
is what I understand of the Einstein theory. 
What I doubt is the equation formula. It seems 
to me, also, that the velocity of light through 
space is the deus ex machina in Einstein's phys- 
ics. Somebody will some day put salt on the tail 
of light as it travels through space, and then its 
simple velocity will split up into something 
complex, and the Relativity formula will fall to 
bits. — But I am a confirmed outsider, so I'll hold 
my tongue. 

All I know is that people have got the word 
Relativity into their heads, and catchwords al- 
ways refer to some latent idea or conception in 
the popular mind. It has taken a Jew to knock 
the last center-pin out of our ideally spinning 
universe. The Jewish intelligence for centuries 
has been picking holes in our ideal system — sci- 
entific and sociological. Very good thing for 
us. Now Mr. Einstein, we are glad to say, has 
pulled out the very axle pin. At least that is 
how the vulgar mind understands it. The equa- 
tion formula doesn't count. — So now, the? uni- 



THE LOWER SELF 269 

verse, according to the popular mind, can wob- 
ble about without being pinned down. — Really, 
an anarchical conclusion. But the Jewish mind 
insidiously drives us to anarchical conclusions. 
We are glad to be driven from false, automatic 
fixities, anyhow. And once we are driven right 
on to nihilism we may find a way through. 

So, there is nothing absolute left in the uni- 
verse. Nothing. Lord Haldane says pure 
knowledge is absolute. As far as it goes, no 
doubt. But pure knowledge is only such a tiny 
bit of the universe, and always relative to the 
thing known and to the knower. 

I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think 
there is no one absolute principle in the uni- 
verse. I think everything is relative. But I also 
feel, most strongly, that in itself each individual 
living creature is absolute: in its own being. 
And that all things in the universe are just rela- 
tive to the individual living creature. And that 
individual living creatures are relative to each 
other. 

And what about a goal? There is no final 
goal. But every step taken has its own little rel- 
ative goal. So what about the next step? 

Well, first and foremost, that every individual 
creature shall come to its own particular and in- 



270 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

dividual fullness of being. — Very nice, very 
pretty — but how? Well, through a living dy- 
namic relation to other creatures. — Very nice 
again, pretty little adjectives. But what sort of 
a living dynamic relation? — Well, not the rela- 
tion of love, that's one thing, nor of brotherhood, 
nor equality. The next relation has got to be a 
relationship of men towards men in a spirit of 
unfathomable trust and responsibility, service 
and leadership, obedience and pure authority. 
Men have got to choose their leaders, and obey 
them to the death. And it must be a system of 
culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a 
pyramid to the supreme leader. 

All of which sounds very distasteful at the 
moment. But upon all the vital lessons we have 
learned during our era of love and spirit and 
democracy we can found our new order. 

We wanted to be all of a piece. And we 
couldn't bring it off. Because we just aren't all 
of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing but 
nice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and 
refined. But it didn't work. Because whether 
we want it or not, we've got night-time selves. 
And the most spiritual woman ever born or made 
has to perform her natural functions just like 



THE LOWER SELF 271 

anybody else. We must always keep in line with 
this fact. 

Well, then, we have night-time selves. And 
the night-self is the very basis of the dynamic 
self. The blood-consciousness and the blood- 
passion is the very source and origin of us. Not 
that we can stay at the source. Nor even make 
a goal of the source, as Freud does. The busi- 
ness of living is to travel away from the source. 
But you must start every single day fresh from 
the source. You must rise every day afresh out 
of the dark sea of the blood. 

When you go to sleep at night, you have to 
say: "Here dies the man I am and know myself 
to be." And when you rise in the morning you 
have to say: "Here rises an unknown quantity 
which is still myself." 

The self which rises naked every morning out 
of the dark sleep of the passionate, hoarsely-call- 
ing blood: this is the unit for the next society. 
And the polarizing of the passionate blood in the 
individual towards life, and towards leader, this 
must be the dynamic of the next civilization. 
The intense, passionate yearning of the soul to- 
wards the soul of a stronger, greater individual, 
and the passionate blood-belief in the fulfillment 



272 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

of this yearning will give men the next motive 
for life. 

We have to sink back into the darkness and the 
elemental consciousness of the blood. And from 
this rise again. But there is no rising until the 
bath of darkness and extinction is accomplished. 

As social units, as civilized men we have to do 
what we do as physical organisms. Every day, 
the sun sets from the sky, and darkness falls, and 
every day, when this happens, the tide of life 
turns in us. Instead of flowing upwards and out- 
wards towards mental consciousness and activity, 
it turns back, to flow downwards. Downwards 
towards the digestion processes, downwards fur- 
ther to the great sexual conjunctions, downwards 
to sleep. 

This is the soul now retreating, back from the 
outer life of day, back to the origins. And so, it 
stays its hour at the first great sensual stations, 
the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion. But 
the tide ebbs on, down to the immense, almost 
inhuman passionate darkness of sex, the strange 
and moon-like intensity of the hypogastric plexus 
and the sacral ganglion, then deep, deeper, past 
the last great station of the darkest psyche, down 
to the earth's center. Then we sleep. 

And the moon is the tide-turner. The moon is 



THE LOWER SELF 273 

the great cosmic pole which calls us back, back 
out of our day-self, back through the moonlit 
darknesses of the sensual planes, to sleep. It is 
the moon that sways the blood, and sways us 
back into the extinction of the blood. — And as 
the soul retreats back into the sea of its own dark- 
ness, the mind, stage by stage, enjoys the mental 
consciousness that belongs to this retreat back 
into the sensual deeps; and then it goes extin- 
guished. There is sleep. 

And so we resolve back towards our ele- 
mentals. We dissolve back, out of the upper 
consciousness, out of mind and sight and speech, 
back, down into the deep and massive, swaying 
consciousness of the dark, living blood. At the 
last hour of sex I am no more than a powerful 
wave of mounting blood. Which seeks to surge 
and join with the answering sea in the other in- 
dividual. When the sea of individual blood 
which I am at that hour heaves and finds its 
pure contact with the sea of individual blood 
which is the woman at that hour, then each of us 
enters into the wholeness of our deeper infini- 
tude, our profound fullness of being, in the 
ocean of our oneness and our consciousness. 

This is under the spell of the moon, of sea- 
born Aphrodite, mother and bitter goddess. For 



274 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

I am carried away from my sunny day-self into 
this other tremendous self, where knowledge 
will not save me, but where I must obey as the 
sea obeys the tides. Yet however much I go, I 
know that I am all the while myself, in my 
going. 

This then is the duality of my day and my 
night being : a duality so bitter to an adolescent. 
For the adolescent thinks with shame and terror 
of his night. He would wish to have no night- 
self. But it is Moloch, and he cannot escape it. 

The tree is born of its roots and its leaves. And 
we of our days and our nights. Without the 
night-consummation we are trees without roots. 

And the night-consummation takes place un- 
der the spell of the moon. It is one pure motion 
of meeting and oneing. But even so, it is a cir- 
cuit, not a straight line. One pure motion of 
meeting and oneing, until the flash breaks forth, 
when the two are one. And this, this flashing 
moment of the ignition of two seas of blood, this 
is the moment of begetting. But the begetting of 
a child is less than the begetting of the man and 
the woman. Woman is begotten of man at that 
moment, into her greater self : and man is begot- 
ten of woman. This is the main. And that which 
cannot be fulfilled, perfected in the two individ- 



THE LOWER SELF 275 

uals, that which cannot take fire into individual 
life, this trickles down and is the seed of a new 
life, destined ultimately to fulfill that which the 
parents could not fulfill. So it is for ever. 

Sex then is a polarization of the individual 
blood in man towards the individual blood in 
woman. It is more, also. But in its prime func- 
tional reality it is this. And sex union means 
bringing into connection the dynamic poles of 
sex in man and woman. 

In sex we have our basic, most elemental be- 
ing. Here we have our most elemental contact. 
It is from the hypogastric plexus and the sacral 
ganglion that the dark forces of manhood and 
womanhood sparkle. From the dark plexus of 
sympathy run out the acute, intense sympathetic 
vibrations direct to the corresponding pole. Or 
so it should be, in genuine passionate love. There 
is no mental interference. There is even no in- 
terference of the upper centers. Love is sup- 
posed to be blind. Though modern love wears 
strong spectacles. 

But love is really blind. Without sight or 
scent or hearing the powerful magnetic current 
vibrates from the hypogastric plexus in the fe- 
male, vibrating on to the air like some intense 
wireless message. And there is immediate re- 



276 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

sponse from the sacral ganglion in some male. 
And then sight and day-consciousness begin to 
fade. In the lower animals apparently any male 
can receive the vibration of any female: and if 
need be, even across long distances of space. But 
the higher the development the more individual 
the attunement. Every wireless station can only 
receive those messages which are in its own vi- 
bration key. So with sex in specialized individ- 
uals. From the powerful dynamic center the 
female sends out her dark summons, the intense 
dark vibration of sex. And according to her na- 
ture, she receives her responses from the males. 
The male enters the magnetic field of the female. 
He vibrates helplessly in response. There is 
established at once a dynamic circuit, more or 
less powerful. It would seem as if, while ever 
life remains free and wild and independent, the 
sex-circuit, while it lasts, is omnipotent. There 
is one electric flow which encompasses one male 
and one female, or one male and one particular 
group of females all polarized in the same key 
of vibration. 

This circuit of vital sex magnetism, at first 
loose and wide, gradually closes and becomes 
more powerful, contracts and grows more in- 
tense, until the two individuals arrive into con- 






THE LOWER SELF 277 

tact. And even then the pulse and flow of attrac- 
tion and recoil varies. In free wild life, each 
touch brings about an intense recoil, and each 
recoil causes an intense sympathetic attraction. 
So goes on the strange battle of desire, until the 
consummation is reached. 

It is the precise parallel of what happens in a 
thunder-storm, when the dynamic forces of the 
moon and the sun come into collision. The re- 
sult is threefold : first, the electric flash, then the 
birth of pure water, new water. 

So it is in sex relation. There is a threefold 
result. First, the flash of pure sensation and of 
real electricity. Then there is the birth of an 
entirely new state of blood in each partner. And 
then there is the liberation. 

But the main thing, as in the thunder-storm, is 
the absolute renewal of the atmosphere: in this 
case, the blood. It would no doubt be found 
that the electro-dynamic condition of the white 
and red corpuscles of the blood was quite differ- 
ent after sex union, and that the chemical com- 
position of the fluid of the blood was quite 
changed. 

And in this renewal lies the great magic of 
sex. The life of an individual goes on appar- 
ently the same from day to day. But as a matter 



278 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

of fact there is an inevitable electric accumula- 
tion in the nerves and the blood, an accumula- 
tion which weighs there and broods there with 
intolerable pressure. And the only possible 
means of relief and renewal is in pure passional 
interchange. There is and must be a pure pas- 
sional interchange from the upper self, as when 
men unite in some great creative or religious or 
constructive activity, or as when they fight each 
other to the death. The great goal of creative 
or constructive activity, or of heroic victory in 
fight, must always be the goal of the day- 
time self. But the very possibility of such a 
goal arises out of the vivid dynamism of the con- 
scious blood. And the blood in an individual 
finds its great renewal in a perfected sex circuit. 
A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex 
union. And there can be no successful sex 
union unless the greater hope of purposive, 
constructive activity fires the soul of the man 
all the time : or the hope of passionate, purposive 
destructive activity: the two amount religiously 
to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as 
an end in itself is a disaster : a vice. But an ideal 
purpose which has no roots in the deep sea of 
passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And 
now we have only these two things : sex as a fatal 



THE LOWER SELF 279 

goal, which is the essential theme of modern 
tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly parasite. 
Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to 
tragedy. There must be the great purposive 
inspiration always present. But the automatic 
ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slow 
humiliation and sterility. 

The great thing is to keep the sexes pure. And 
by pure we don't mean an ideal sterile innocence 
and similarity between boy and girl. We mean 
pure maleness in a man, pure femaleness in a 
woman. Woman is really polarized downwards, 
towards the center of the earth. Her deep pos- 
itivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. 
And man is polarized upwards, towards the sun 
and the day's activity. Women and men are 
dynamically different, in everything. Even in 
the mind, where we seem to meet, we are really 
utter strangers. We may speak the same verbal 
language, men and women : as Turk and German 
might both speak Latin. But whatever a man 
says, his meaning is something quite different 
and changed when it passes through a woman's 
ears. And though you reverse the sexual polar- 
ity, the flow between the sexes, still the difference 
is the same. The apparent mutual understand- 
ing, in companionship between a man and a 



280 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

woman, is always an illusion, and always breaks 
down in the end. 

Woman can polarize her consciousness up- 
wards. She can obtain a hand even over her sex 
receptivity. She can divert even the electric 
spasm of coition into her upper consciousness: 
it was the trick which the snake and the apple 
between them taught her. The snake, whose 
consciousness is only dynamic, and non-cerebral. 
The snake r who has no mental life, but only an 
intensely vivid dynamic mind, he envied the hu- 
man race its mental consciousness. And he 
knew, this intensely wise snake, that the one way 
to make humanity pay more than the price of 
mental consciousness was to pervert woman into 
mentality: to stimulate her into the upper flow 
of consciousness. 

For the true polarity of consciousness in wom- 
an is downwards. Her deepest consciousness 
is in the loins and belly. Even when perverted, 
it is so. The great flow of female consciousness 
is downwards, down to the weight of the loins 
and round the circuit of the feet. Pervert this, 
and make a false flow upwards, to the breast and 
head, and you get a race of "intelligent" women, 
delightful companions, tricky courtesans, clever 
prostitutes, noble idealists, devoted friends, in- 



THE LOWER SELF 281 

teresting mistresses, efficient workers, brilliant 
managers, women as good as men at all the 
manly tricks: and better, because they are so 
very headlong once they go in for men's tricks. 
But then, after a while, pop it all goes. The 
moment woman has got man's ideals and tricks 
drilled into her, the moment she is competent in 
the manly world — there's an end of it. She's had 
enough. She's had more than enough. She 
hates the thing she has embraced. She becomes 
absolutely perverse, and her one end is to pros- 
titute herself and her ideals to sex. Which is her 
business at the present moment. 

We bruise the serpent's head: his flat and 
brainless head. But his revenge of bruising our 
heel is a good one. The heels, through which 
the powerful downward circuit flows : these are 
bruised in us, numbed with a horrible neurotic 
numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes 
us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We 
become flimsy fungoid beings, with no roots and 
no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The ser- 
pent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame 
gods, the enslaved gods, the toiling limpers 
moaning for the woman. You don't find the sun 
and moon playing at pals in the sky. Their 



282 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

beams cross the great gulf which is between 
them. 

So with man and woman. They must stand 
clear again. They must fight their way out of 
their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. 
Or, rather, each must fight the other out of self- 
consciousness. Instead of this leprous forbear- 
ance which we are taught to practice in our in- 
timate relationships, there should be the most 
intense open antagonism. If your wife flirts 
with other men, and you don't like it, say so be- 
fore them all, before wife and man and all, say 
you won't have it. If she seems to you false, in 
any circumstance, tell her so, angrily, furiously, 
and stop her. Never mind about being justified. 
If you hate anything she does, turn on her in a 
fury. Harry her, and make her life a hell, so 
long as the real hot rage is in you. Don't silently 
hate her, or silently forbear. It is such a dirty 
trick, so mean and ungenerous. If you feel a 
burning rage, turn on her and give it to her, 
and never repent. It'll probably hurt you much 
more than it hurts her. But never repent for 
your real hot rages, whether they're "justifiable" 
or not. If you care one sweet straw for the 
woman, and if she makes you that you can't bear 
any more, give it to her, and if your heart weeps 



THE LOWER SELF 283 

tears of blood afterwards, tell her you're thank- 
ful she's got it for once, and you wish she had it 
worse. 

The same with wives and their husbands. If 
a woman's husband gets on her nerves, she should 
fly at him. If she thinks him too sweet and 
smarmy with other people, she should let him 
have it to his nose, straight out. She should lead 
him a dog's life, and never swallow her bile. 

With wife or husband, you should never swal- 
low your bile. It makes you go all wrong inside. 
Always let fly, tooth and nail, and never repent, 
no matter what sort of a figure you make. 

We have a vice of love, of softness and sweet- 
ness and smarminess and intimacy and promis- 
cuous kindness and all that sort of thing. We 
think it's so awfully nice of us to be like that, in 
ourselves. But in our wives or our husbands it 
gets on our nerves horribly. Yet we think it 
oughtn't to, so we swallow our spleen. 

We shouldn't. When Jesus said "if thine eye 
offend thee, pluck it out," he was beside the 
point. The eye doesn't really offend us. We 
are rather fond of our own squint eye. It only 
offends the person who cares for us. And it's 
up to this person to pluck it out. 

This holds particularly good of the love and 



284 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

intimacy vice. It'll never offend us in ourselves. 
While it will be gall and wormwood to our wife 
or husband. And it is on this promiscuous love 
and intimacy and kindness and sweetness, all a 
vice, that our self-consciousness really rests. If 
we are battered out of this, we shall be battered 
out of self-consciousness. 

And so, men, drive your wives, beat them out 
of their self-consciousness and their soft smarmi- 
ness and good, lovely idea of themselves. Abso- 
lutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to 
tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous 
sight in their own eyes. Wives, do the same to 
your husbands. 

But fight for your life, men. Fight your wife 
out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with 
herself. Batter her out of it till she's stunned. 
Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all 
her nice superimposed modern-woman and won- 
derful-creature garb off her. Reduce her once 
more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying. 

Make her yield to her own real unconscious 
self, and absolutely stamp on the self that she's 
got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back 
into her own true unconscious. 

And then you've got a harder thing still to do. 
Stop her from looking on you as her "lover." 



THE LOWER SELF 285 

Cure her of that, if you haven't cured her before. 
Put the fear of the Lord into her that way. And 
make her know she's got to believe in you again, 
and in the deep purpose you stand for. But be- 
fore you can do that, you've got to stand for 
some deep purpose. It's no good faking one up. 
You won't take a woman in, not really. Even 
when she chooses to be taken in, for prettiness' 
sake, it won't do you any good. 

But combat her. Combat her in her sexual 
pertinacity, and in her secret glory or arrogance 
in the sexual goal. Combat her in her cock-sure 
belief that she "knows" and that she is "right." 
Take it all out of her. Make her yield once 
more to the male leadership : if you've got any- 
where to lead to. If you haven't, best leave the 
woman alone; she has one goal of her own, any- 
how, and it's better than your nullity and emp- 
tiness. 

You've got to take a new resolution into your 
soul, and break off from the old way. You've 
got to know that you're a man, and being a man 
means you must go on alone, ahead of the wom- 
an, to break a way through the old world into 
the new. And you've got to be alone. And 
you've got to start off ahead. And if you don't 
know which direction to take, look round for the 



286 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

man your heart will point out to you. And fol- 
low — and never look back. Because if Lot's 
wife, looking back, was turned to a pillar of 
salt, these miserable men, for ever looking back 
to their women for guidance, they are miserable 
pillars of half-rotten tears. 

You'll have to fight to make a woman believe 
in you as a real man, a real pioneer. No man is 
a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. 
You'll have to fight still harder to make her 
yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your 
day goal. The moon, the planet of women, 
sways us back from our day-self, sways us back 
from our real social unison, sways us back, like 
a retreating tide, in a friction of criticism and 
separation and social disintegration. That is 
woman's inevitable mode, let her words be what 
they will. Her goal is the deep, sensual individ- 
ualism of secrecy and night-exclusiveness, hos- 
tile, with guarded doors. And you'll have to 
fight very hard to make a woman yield her goal 
to yours, to make her, in her own soul, believe in 
your goal as the goal beyond, in her goal as the 
way by which you go. She'll never believe until 
you have your soul filled with a profound and 
absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield 
to nothing, least of all to her. She'll never be- 



THE LOWEx SELF 287 

lieve until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone 
ahead, into the dark. 

She may of course already love you, and love 
you for yourself. But the love will be a nest 
of scorpions unless it is overshadowed by a little 
fear or awe of your further purpose, a living 
belief in your going beyond her, into futurity. 

But when once a woman does believe in her 
man, in the pioneer which he is, the pioneer who 
goes on ahead beyond her, into the darkness in 
front, and who may be lost to her for ever in this 
darkness; when once she knows the pain and 
beauty of this belief, knows that the loneliness 
of waiting and following is inevitable, that it 
must be so; ah, then, how wonderful it is! How 
wonderful it is to come back to her, at evening, 
as she sits half in fear and waits! How good it 
is to come home to her! How good it is then 
when the night falls! How richly the evening 
passes! And then, for her, at last, all that she 
has lost during the day to have it again between 
her arms, all that she has missed, to have it 
poured out for her, and a richness and a wonder 
she had never expected. It is her hour, her goal. 
That's what it is to have a wife. 

Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife 
when she believes in you and submits to your 



288 FAN THE UNCONSCIOUS 

purpose thai is iX>^nJ her. Then, how wonder- 
ful this nightfall is! How rich you feel, tired, 
with all the burden of the day in your veins, 
turning home! Then you too turn to your other 
goal: to the splendor of darkness between her 
arms. And you know the goal is there for you : 
how rich that feeling is. And you feel an un- 
fathomable gratitude to the woman who loves 
you and believes in your purpose and receives 
you into the magnificent dark gratification of her 
embrace. That's what it is to have a wife. 

But no man ever had a wife unless he served 
a great predominant purpose. Otherwise, he 
has a lover, a mistress. No matter how much 
she may be married to him, unless his days have 
a living purpose, constructive or destructive, but 
a purpose beyond her and all she stands for; 
unless his days have this purpose, and his soul is 
really committed to his purpose, she will not be 
a wife, she will be only a mistress and he will 
be her lover. 

If the man has no purpose for his days, then to 
the woman alone remains the goal of her nights: 
the great sex goal. And this goal is no goal, but 
always cries for the something beyond : for the 
rising in the morning and the going forth be- 
yond, the man disappearing ahead into the dis- 



THE LOWER SELF 289 

tance of futurity, that which his purpose stands 
for, the future. The sex goal needs, absolutely 
needs, this further departure. And if there be 
no further departure, no great way of belief on 
ahead: and if sex is the starting point and the 
goal as well : then sex becomes like the bottom- 
less pit, insatiable. It demands at last the de- 
parture into death, the only available beyond. 
Like Carmen, or like Anna Karenina. When sex 
is the starting point and the returning point both, 
then the only issue is death. Which is plain as 
a pike-staff in "Carmen" or "Anna Karenina," 
and is the theme of almost all modern tragedy. 
Our one hackneyed, hackneyed theme. Ecstasies 
and agonies of love, and final passion of death. 
Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a 
great passion. Lovers, pure lovers should say 
"Let it be so." 

And one is always tempted to say "Let it be 
so." But no, let it be not so. Only I say this, 
let it be a great passion and then death, rather 
than a false or faked purpose. Tolstoi said "No" 
to the passion and the death conclusion. And 
then drew into the dreary issue of a false con- 
clusion. His books were better than his life. 
Better the woman's goal, sex and death, than 
some false goal of man's. 



290 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

Better Anna Karenina and Vronsky a thousand 
times than Natasha and that porpoise of a 
Pierre. This pretty, slightly sordid couple 
tried so hard to kid themselves that the porpoise 
Pierre was puffing with great purpose. Better 
Vransky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. Bet- 
ter Vronsky's final statement: "As a soldier I am 
still some good. As a man I am a ruin" — better 
that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and that 
beastly peasant blouse the old man wore. 

Better passion and death than any more of 
these "isms." No more of the old purpose done 
up in aspic. Better passion and death. 

But still — we might live, mightn't we? 

For heaven's sake answer plainly "No," if 
you feel like it. No good temporizing. 



EPILOGUE 

"Tutti i salmi finiscono in gloria/* 

All the psalms wind up with the Gloria. — "As 
it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, 
World without end. Amen." 

Well, then, Amen. 

I hope you say Amen! along with me, dear 
little reader: if there be any dear little reader 
who has got so far. If not, I say Amen! all by 
myself. — But don't you think the show is all 
over. I've got another volume up my sleeve, 
and after a year or two years, when I have shaken 
it down my sleeve, I shall bring it and lay it at 
the foot of your Liberty statue, oh Columbia, as 
I do this one. 

I suppose Columbia means the States. — 
"Hail Columbia!" — I suppose, etymologically, 
it is a nest of turtle-doves, Lat. columba, a dove. 
Coo me softly, then, Columbia; don't roar me 
like the sucking doves of the critics of my "Psy- 
choanalysis and the Unconscious." 

And when I lay this little book at the foot of 

the Liberty statue, that brawny lady is not to 

291 



292 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

look down her nose and bawl: "Do you see any 
green in my eye?" Of course I don't, dear lady. 
I only see the reflection of that torch — or is it a 
carrot? — which you are holding up to light the 
way into New York harbor. Well, many an ass 
has strayed across the uneasy paddock of the 
Atlantic, to nibble your carrot, dear lady. And 
I must say, you can keep on slicing off nice little 
carrot-slices of guineas and doubloons for an ex- 
traordinarily inexhaustible long time. And in- 
numerable asses can collect themselves nice little 
heaps of golden carrot-slices, and then lift up 
their heads and brag over them with fairly pan- 
demoniac yells of gratification. Of course I don't 
see any green in your eye, dear Libertas, unless 
it is the smallest glint from the carrot-tips. The 
gleam in your eye is golden, oh Columbia! 

Nevertheless, and in spite of all this, up trots 
this here little ass and makes you a nice present 
of this pretty book. You needn't sniff, and glance 
at your carrot-sceptre, lady Liberty. You needn't 
throw down the thinnest carrot-paring you can 
pare off, and then say: "Why should I pay for 
this tripe, this wordy mass of rather revolting 
nonsense!" You can't pay for it, darling. If I 
didn't make you a present of it you could never 
buy it. So don't shake your carrot-sceptre and 



EPILOGUE 293 

feel supercilious. Here's a gift for you, Missis. 
You can look in its mouth, too. Mind it doesn't 
bite you. — No, you needn't bother to put your 
carrot behind your back, nobody wants to 
snatch it. 

How do you do, Columbia! Look, I brought 
you a posy: this nice little posy of words and 
wisdom which I made for you in the woods of 
Ebersteinburg, on the borders of the Black For- 
est, near Baden Baden, in Germany, in this sum- 
mer of scanty grace but nice weather. I made it 
specially for you — Whitman, for whom I have 
an immense regard, says "These States." I sup- 
pose I ought to say: "Those States." If the pub- 
lisher would let me, I'd dedicate this book to you, 
to "Those States." Because I wrote this book 
entirely for you, Columbia. You may not take 
it as a compliment. You may even smell a tiny 
bit of Schwarzwald sap in it, and be finally dis- 
gusted. I admit that trees ought to think twice 
before they flourish in such a disgraced place as 
the Fatherland. u Chi va cot zoppi, all' anno 
zoppica." But you've not only to gather ye rose- 
buds while ye may, but where ye may. And so, 
as I said before, the Black Forest, etc. 

I know, Columbia, dear Libertas, you'll take 
my posy and put your carrot aside for a minute, 



294 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

and smile, and say: "I'm sure, Mr. Lawrence, 
it is a long time since I had such a perfectly 
beautiful bunch of ideas brought me." And I 
shall blush and look sheepish and say: "So glad 
you think so. I believe you'll find they'll keep 
fresh quite a long time, if you put them in wa- 
ter." Whereupon you, Columbia, with real 
American gallantry: "Oh, they'll keep for ever, 
Mr. Lawrence. They couldn't be so cruel as to 
go and die, such perfectly lovely-colored ideas. 
Lovely! Thank you ever, ever so much." 

Just think of it, Columbia, how pleased we 
shall be with one another : and how much nicer 
it will be than if you snorted "High-falutin' 
Nonsense" — or "Wordy mass of repulsive rub- 
bish." 

"When they were busy making Italy, and were 
just going to put it in the oven to bake: that is, 
when Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele had 
won their victories at Caserta, Naples prepared 
to give them a triumphant entry. So there sat 
the little king in his carriage: he had short legs 
and huge swagger mustaches and a very big 
bump of philoprogeniture. The town was all 
done up, in spite of the rain. And down either 
side of the wide street were hasty statues of large, 
well-fleshed ladies, each one holding up a fore- 



EPILOGUE 295 

finger. We don't know what the king thought. 
But the staff held their breath. The king's appe- 
tite for strapping ladies was more than notorious, 
and naturally it looked as if Naples had done it 
on purpose. 

As a matter of fact, the forefinger meant Italia 
Una! "Italy shall be one." Ask Don Sturzo. 

Now you see how risky statues are. How 
many nice little asses and poets trot over the At- 
lantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up this 
carrot of desire at arm's length, and fairly hear 
her say, as one does to one's pug dog, with a lump 
of sugar: "Beg! Beg!" — and "Jump! Jump, 
then !" And each little ass and poodle begins to 
beg and to jump, and there's a rare game round 
about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap! 

Do lower the carrot, gentle Liberty, and let us 
talk nicely and sensibly. I don't like you as a 
carotaia, precious. 

Talking about the moon, it is thrilling to read 
the announcements of Professor Pickering of 
Harvard, that it's almost a dead cert that there's 
life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that 
there's life on the moon as it is certain there is 
life on Mars. The professor bases his assertions 
on photographs — hundreds of photographs — of 
a crater with a circumference of thirty-seven 



296 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

miles. I'm not satisfied. I demand to know the 
yards, feet and inches. You don't come it over 
me with the triteness of these round numbers. 

"Hundreds of photographic reproductions 
have proved irrefutably the springing up at 
dawn, with an unbelievable rapidity, of vast 
fields of foliage which come into blossom just as 
rapidly (sic!) and which disappear in a max- 
imum period of eleven days." — Again I'm not 
satisfied. I want to know if they're cabbages, 
cress, mustard, or marigolds or dandelions or 
daisies. Fields of foliage, mark you. And blos- 
som! Come now, if you can get so far, Pro- 
fessor Pickering, you might have a shrewd guess 
as to whether the blossoms are good to eat, or if 
they're purely for ornament. 

I am only waiting at last for an aeroplane to 
land on one of these fields of foliage and find a 
donkey grazing peacefully. Hee-haw! 

"The plates moreover show that great bliz- 
zards, snow-storms, and volcanic eruptions are 
also frequent." So no doubt the blossoms are 
edelweiss. 

"We find," says the professor, "a living world 
at our very doors where life in some respects 
resembles that of Mars." All I can say is: "Pray 



EPILOGUE 29V 

come in, Mr. Moony. And how is your cousin^ 
Signor Martian?" 

Now I'm sure Professor Pickering's photo- 
graphs and observations are really wonderful. 
But his explanations! Come now, Columbia, 
where is your High-falutin' Nonsense trumpet? 
Vast fields of foliage which spring up at 
dawn (!!!) and come into blossom just as 
quickly (!!!!) are rather too flowery even for 
my flowery soul. But there, truth is stranger 
than fiction. 

I'll bet my moon against the Professor's, any- 
how. 

So long, Columbia. A riverderci. 



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